With Nasrin Rahimieh, University of California, Irvine.
Discussant: Ali Mirsepassi, New York University.

My experience of directing an Iranian studies center in southern California provided me with unique opportunities to work with members of the Iranian American community, cultural associations, and donors. The linguistic, ethnic, and religious diversities of the local Iranian community bode well for exploring the different facets of Iranian culture in a university setting. But the promise and potential were at times weighed down by an impulse to contain and/or disavow Islam as a constitutive part of Iranian cultural legacy and by other effects of diaspora. In my presentation I will explore the ramifications of tensions that at times risked derailing the mission of an academic center devoted to the study of Iran. Understanding the anxieties manifested at the intersection of the academy and the community could pave the way for more robust engagements with ideas of Iran in the US academy today.

Nasrin Rahimieh is Howard Baskerville Professor of Humanities, Professor of Comparative Literature, and the Director of the Humanities Core Program at the University of California, Irvine. She served as the inaugural Director of the Samuel Jordan Center for Persian Studies and Culture from 2006 to 2014, Interim Director of the Culture and Theory PhD Program 2015-16, and Chair of the Department of Comparative Literature 2016-2019. She was Dean of Humanities at McMaster University 2003-2006 and Associate Dean of Humanities at the University of Alberta 1999-2002.

Her teaching and research are focused on modern Persian literature, the literature of Iranian exile and diaspora, and contemporary Iranian women’s writing. Among her publications are Missing Persians: Discovering Voices in Iranian Cultural History, Forugh Farrokhzad, Poet Of Modern Iran: Iconic Woman And Feminine Pioneer Of New Persian Poetry co-edited with Dominic Parviz Brookshaw and Iranian Culture: Representation and Identity. She translated the late Taghi Modarressi’s last novel, The Virgin of Solitude from Persian into English.