On February 1, the Department of Middle Eastern Languages and Cultures held its annual Afrassiabi distinguished lecture in Persian and Iranian studies. The lecture series highlights informed and generative perspectives on Iran and Persian literature in a variety of disciplines and topics. The inaugural lecture was delivered in 1999 by Dick Davis, the eminent English translator of Persian poetry and academic. Since then, eighteenth speakers have given talks at the University of Washington.
This year, the lectureship turned twenty five years old. MELC celebrated this milestone by holding a series of unique and well-attended events that pushed against the boundaries of Persian and Iranian studies, two fields that are problematically conceptualized as singular in American academia. This problem of cultural singularity, one of the most salient features of area studies, has generated wrongheaded and ahistorical ideas: framing Persian language and literature as the exclusive patrimony of Iran and the erasure of Iran’s other languages of cultural importance (i.e. Azeri Turkish, Armenian, Georgian).
MELC welcomed two speakers who shared their unique research and enthusiasm for literary history with the faculty, students, and members of the Iranian and Afghan communities in Washington State: Dr. Nasir Arian, a visiting assistant professor of modern Iranian history at Penn State University and Mr. Mehrdad Rahimi-Moghaddam from the New South Wales University in Sydney, Australia.
On January 30, attended by a mixed audience of students, faculty and community members, Mr. Rahimi-Moghaddam delivered a dynamic and informative presentation in which he traced the life of Azeri Turkish as a medium of oral and literary cultures in the course of four centuries. His presentation (see slides here) challenged the ahistorical notion that Persian enjoyed an exclusive status as a language of learning and literature by briefly examining Azerbaijani Turkish texts produced in Iran. The latter part of his presentation focused on the invention of monolingualism in late Qajar Iran, a project that the Pahlavi dynasty (1925-1979) institutionalized through vilification of and violence toward Turkic peoples in Iran (see image below for instance).