The Afrassiabi Endowed Lecture in Persian and Iranian Studies was held on February 11, 2017.
“Books from Bombay: Tehran’s Print Marketplace and its Transnational Dimensions, 1900-1950”
Afshin Marashi, Associate Professor of International and Area Studies and Farzaneh Family Chair of Modern Iranian History at the University of Oklahoma
Free and open to the public, no tickets or reservations required. Reception to follow in Kane 225.
As modern print technologies became increasingly commonplace inside Iran - first via the lithographic method and later via the introduction of typography - traditional patterns of the production, circulation, and commerce of books experienced large-scale transformations. Among the changes that reshaped Iran’s print culture during this period was the growth of a new class of Tehran-based print entrepreneurs with increasingly transnational and global connections.
This talk will explore the evolution of Tehran’s marketplace of books during the early decades of the twentieth century and trace the emergence of this new class of Iranian print-entrepreneurs, and detail the social and cultural implications of their growing ties to the Persian-language marketplace of books in the Indian subcontinent.
AFSHIN MARASHI is the Farzaneh Family Chair of Modern Iranian History at the University of Oklahoma, where he also serves as the Director of the OU Center for Iranian Studies. He is also a member of the council of the Association for Iranian Studies, and is an editorial board member of the International Journal of Middle East Studies. His publications include Nationalizing Iran: Culture, Power, and the State, 1870-1940 (University of Washington Press, 2008), and a co-edited volume, Rethinking Iranian Nationalism and Modernity (University of Texas, 2014). His research has also appeared in The Journal of Persianate Studies, Iranian Studies, the International Journal of Middle East Studies, and Iran-Nameh. He is currently completing a book-length project on the cultural and intellectual exchange between the Zoroastrian-Parsi community of India and modern Iran, titled Exile and the Kingdom: The Parsi Community of India and the Making of Modern Iranian Nationalism.
Sponsored by: The Department of Near Eastern Languages in conjunction with the Persian and Iranian Studies Program at the University of Washington.
This lectureship was established in honor of Hooshang Afrassiabi, who passed away on February 14, 1998. By that time, Hooshang and his family had lived in Seattle for almost two decades, having moved to the U.S. after the 1979 Iranian Revolution. Mr. Afrassiabi's advanced degrees in Iran had included a focus on administration and government affairs, and he had a distinguished career in government service, including the position of Mayor of the lovely city of Shiraz. But his undergraduate education there had been in Persian literature, a love that he was to cherish for the rest of his life. In 1999 his three sons, all alumni of the UW in various fields, began the establishment of an endowment in their father's name. The endowment supports this lectureship as well as the annual student prize.