Date: Friday, April 11
Time: 12 PM
Location: The Heyman Center, Second Floor Common Room, Columbia University

Meet two writers who have arrived at the personal essay form via different avenues. Sara Mokhavat, an actress and filmmaker has written about how it is to be a working woman - particularly in the arts - in Iran. Vali Khalili, a once traditional journalist who, because of the vagaries of living in an authoritarian state has turned more to the craft of essay writing in order to understand the lives of youth and women in his country - but even more importantly, in order to convey what it means to be a man in Iran after the Woman Life Freedom movement. Together these writers and their translator, Salar Abdoh, will discuss the arc of their various careers as they unfold in real time inside Iran rather than the usual reductive narratives generally available from both liberal and reactionary media when discussing the complex and diverse social milieu of Iran.

This event is part of the Against the Grain: Gender and the Fraught Politics of Translation in Persophone World series. These spring events are themed, "In Their Own Words: Iranian Lives and the Personal Essay." Learn more about the series here.

SPEAKERS

Sara Mokhavat is a graduate in Film Studies and Directing from the College of Cinema & Theater in Tehran. For her feature film effort in The Guns of Nane Kardar, she was a finalist as Best Female Role in the 2011 Fajr International Film Festival. Her novel, A Woman Who was Found in the Lost & Found, was published in 2017 and her play, Goodbye My Cherry Orchard, was staged in 2018. Her first short film, Shogun, was made in 2019 and her second film, Private, was shown at the 2021 Chicago International Film Festival and also won the Directors Beyond Borders prize at the Discover Film festival in London. Her latest efforts are Lovebirds, 2023, and Home, 2024. She is also a writer of personal essays concerning women’s lives in Iran that have been published recently in the international magazine of arts & literature, The Markaz Review.

Vali Khalili is currently the managing editor of the economic magazine, Ayandeh Negar and a reporter for Tragedy magazine in Iran. He studied Communications & Journalism at the Azad University of Tehran and ever since has held positions at some of the most important journals and newspapers in Iran, including Shargh Daily, Etemad and Hamshahri. He is a co-writer of the volume, Without Smoke, Fire and Blood (2021), dealing with America’s unprecedented economic sanctions on Iran, and his reporting and essays have appeared in such international venues as The Atlantic, The Markaz Review and Asymptote. He has also twice been nominated for the prestigious True Story international award in Switzerland and once for the Private Eye Writers of America Shamus Award for the short story, “Fear is the Best Keeper of Secrets” in the collection, Tehran Noir. Two anonymously written essays have also been published in the collection, Woman Life Freedom (London, 2023). He lives and works in Tehran.

Salar Abdoh was born in Iran and splits his time between Tehran and New York City. He is the editor of Tehran Noir and author of several novels, most recently Out of Mesopotamia, which was a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice and one of Publishers Weekly’s best books of 2020, and A Nearby Country Called Love, just released in paperback by Penguin and called “a complex portrait of interpersonal relationships in contemporary Iran” by the New York Times and “brutally poignant” by the Washington Post. A prolific essayist and translator as well, Abdoh teaches in the MFA program at the City College of New York.

Mana Kia was born in Iran and is Associate Professor in the Department of Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies at Columbia University. She is an interdisciplinary scholar of the connected histories of early modern Persianate Asia with a focus on the circulation of people, texts, practices, and ideas just before the dominance of modern European colonial power. She is the author of Persianate Selves: Memories of Place and Origin before Nationalism (Stanford, 2020), which was translated into Persian last year. She was a 2023-2024 Heyman Center Fellow.

Date: Monday, April 7 
Time: 6:00 PM - 7:30 PM 
Location: Schiff Room, Earl Hall 

This talk explores how Muslim religious scholars and their sites of learning frame religious identity as a movement through time –often positioning the past as ideal, the present as flawed, and the future as a promised land. It interrogates who controls these narratives that shape Muslim self-fashioning, how they have come to do so and the ethical implications that arise for both scholar and audience.

Dr. Zainab Kabba is a writer, researcher, and strategist focused on fostering meaningful learning and building knowledge ecosystems that drive impact. As Founder and CEO of Quotidian Strategies, she helps organizations navigate complexity through data insights, evaluation, and everyday phenomena. With a background in education, technology, and ethnographic research, her work spans education, leadership development, and public learning initiatives. She is the author of Knowledge, Authority, and Islamic Education in the West and designs spaces for learning, connection, and nuanced practice. Dr. Kabba holds a DPhil from the University of Oxford and an MA from Teachers College, Columbia University.

Date: Tuesday, March 4 
Time: 6:00 pm - 7:30 pm | wine & cheese reception follows 
Location: Stronach Center, 8th floor, Schermerhorn Hall, Art History Department

Dr. Marilyn Jenkins-Madina in conversation with Professor Lila Abu-Lughod, Columbia University. 

Dr. Marilyn Jenkins-Madina is Curator Emerita of the Department of Islamic Art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. During the forty years she served as a curator in that department, she played a key role in helping to create the museum’s first major (ten-gallery) installation of Islamic art as well as adding to the collection and organizing special exhibitions. With an MA in Art History from Columbia University and a PhD from NYU’s Institute of Fine Arts, she has lectured widely, published over 30 articles, and written or co-authored seven books, including the classic Islamic Art and Architecture 650- 1250 with Richard Ettinghausen and Oleg Grabar. Her memoir, The Lure of the East: A Curator’s Fascinating Journey, was published by Rodin Books in 2024.

This event is co-sponsored by the Art History Department, the Middle East Institute, the Center for the Study of Muslim Societies, and Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies (MESAAS). 

Due to current campus access levels, all outside guests must register in advance to access Columbia's Morningside campus where the event will be held. If you do not have a Columbia University ID, please be sure to pre-register no later than Friday, February 28 at 3pm. 

Date: Thursday, February 13
Time: 6:00 PM
Location: Knox Hall, Room 208

Join Mohammad Sadegh Ansari to discuss his book, The Science of Music: Knowledge Production in Medieval Baghdad and Beyond. In this innovative work, Ansari explores how the medieval Islamic intellectual tradition conceptualized and produced scientific knowledge, offering a unique perspective that bridges musicology and intellectual history. He examines how music, categorized as a branch of the mathematical sciences alongside arithmetic, geometry, and astronomy, was intricately linked to medicine and astrology as part of a cosmological system of knowledge. Through this lens, the book raises thought-provoking questions about the impact of defining music as a 'science' rather than an 'art' and what it reveals about medieval Islamic civilizations' understanding of truth and the universe.

Date: Monday, October 28

Time: 5:30 PM - 7:00 PM

Location: Knox Hall, Room 509

Join us for a discussion with novelist and translator Salar Abdoh on how English-language works and translations shape our understanding of Persophone cultures, particularly in Iran and Afghanistan. Abdoh will explore the complexities of representing gendered life worlds and the politics of translation, as well as emerging literary genres from West and Central Asia.

Date: Thursday, October 24

Time: 6:10 PM - 8:00 PM

Location: Knox Hall, Room 208

Join Nathaniel Mathews, Associate Professor of Africana Studies at SUNY-Binghamton, for a discussion on his first book Zanzibar Was a Country. The book explores Zanzibar's fight for independence, the experiences of its postcolonial diasporas, and the intertwined histories of Zanzibar and Oman.

Date: Wednesday, September 18

Time: 6:00 - 7:30 PM

Location: East Gallery, Maison Française, Buell Hall

Join Susan Slyomovics to discuss her book, Monuments Decolonized: Algeria's French Colonial Heritage  

"Statuomania" overtook Algeria beginning in the nineteenth century as the French affinity for monuments placed thousands of war memorials across the French colony. But following Algeria's hard-fought independence in 1962, these monuments took on different meaning and some were "repatriated" to France, legally or clandestinely. Today, in both Algeria and France, people are moving and removing, vandalizing and preserving this contested, yet shared monumental heritage. 

In her book, Susan Slyomovics follows the afterlives of French-built war memorials in Algeria and those taken to France. Drawing on extensive fieldwork and interviews in both countries, she analyzes the colonial nostalgia, dissonant heritage, and ongoing decolonization and iconoclasm of these works of art. Her book offers a fresh aesthetic take on the increasingly global move to fell monuments that celebrate settler colonial histories.