IRANIAN IDENTITY:
QUESTIONS AND CHALLENGES
A Symposium

April 30, 2005
9:30 am – 4:00 pm

The University of Texas at Austin
Texas Governor’s Room
Texas Union 3.116

Sponsored by:
Department of Middle Eastern Studies
Center for Middle Eastern Studies
With the generous support of an anonymous donor
and the assistance of the
Iranian Students Academic and Cultural Organization



WELCOMING REMARKS: 9:30 am

Ian Manners, Chairman of the UT Department of Middle Eastern Studies and Director of the UT Center for Middle Eastern Studies

Panel Participants:
Tara Bahrampour, The Washington Post
Anne Betteridge, University of Arizona
Zjaleh Hajibashi, University of Virginia
Persis Karim, San Jose State University
Abbas Milani, Stanford University
Nasrin Rahimieh, McMaster University (Canada)
Farhang Rajaee, Carlton University (Canada)

Session 1: IRANIAN IDENTITY 10:00-12:00 am

Moderator: Kamran Scott Aghaie, UT Department of Middle Eastern Studies

Session 2: IRANIAN-AMERICAN IDENTITY 2:00-4:00 pm

Moderator: Faridoun Farrokh, Texas A&M International University

For more information contact:
M. R. Ghanoonparvar: <mghanoon@uts.cc.utexas.edu>
or call (512) 475-6605

Symposium Panelists

Kamran Scott Aghaie teaches Islamic and Iranian History at the University of Texas at Austin and is the Associate Director of the Center for Middle Eastern Studies. He earned his PhD in Modern Middle Eastern History at UCLA in 1999. His major publications include The Martyrs of Karbala: Shi'i Symbols and Rituals in Modern Iran (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2004), and The Women of Karbala: The Gender Dynamics of Ritual Performances and Symbolic Discourses of Modern Shi'i Islam (Austin: University of Texas Press, Forthcoming in 2005).

Tara Bahrampour is half-Iranian and half-American and lived in Iran until 1979, when her family left during the Revolution. She attended high school in Portland, Oregon and Palo Alto, California, and received a B.A. in English from U.C. Berkeley and an M.S. in Journalism from Columbia University. She is the author of the memoir To See and See Again: A Life in Iran and America (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1999), which traces her family’s migrations between Iran and the U.S. and her own journey back to Iran as an adult. She has written about Iranians in global limbo for The New Yorker, The New York Times, The American Scholar, The New Republic, and other journals. She lives in Washington D.C. and is a staff writer at The Washington Post.

Anne H. Betteridge, an anthropologist with a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago, is director of the University of Arizona Center for Middle Eastern Studies and associate professor in the Department of Near Eastern Studies. She served as Executive Director of the Middle East Studies Association (MESA) from 1990-2002. Dr. Betteridge’s research interests focus on Iranian culture, particularly women and ritual. She has served on the Board of Directors of the American Council of Learned Societies, the Executive Council of the Society for Iranian Studies, and the Board of Directors of the Association for the Study of Persianate Societies, and is currently a member of the Academic Steering Committee of the Fares Center for Eastern Mediterranean Studies, Tufts University.

Faridoun Farrokh was born and educated in Iran where he began a career of teaching, initially in schools and later at the universities in Shiraz and Mashhad, his hometown. He holds master’s and doctoral degrees in English from the University of Kansas and Middle Tennessee State University, respectively. Currently, he is a professor of English at Texas A&M International University, where he has taught for the past fifteen years and has served as Provost and in various other administrative positions. His academic specialty and research interests are in the English literature of the Restoration Period and the Eighteenth century as well as in the general area of rhetoric and composition. He also has been working on contemporary Iranian fiction and has published and lectured extensively on this subject. His English translation of A Mansion in the Sky, a short-story collection by Goli Taraghi, has recently been published by the Center for Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Texas.

Zjaleh Hajibashi was born in Denton, Texas. Her interest in Iranian culture combined with a love for literature determined the course of her educational pursuits and her career path. She completed a B.A. in English Literature from Rice University then moved to Austin to explore Middle Eastern languages and cultures. She has a Master's Degree in Persian Literature and a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from the University of Texas. Hajibashi joined the Persian Program at the University of Virginia in Fall 2000. Her forthcoming book, The Fiction of the Post-Revolution Woman, required extensive research in Iran, where she served as editor of Film International. Her current project is a study of post-Revolution prison memoirs titled, "Writing Confinement: The Limits of Autobiographical Expression in Iran.” She is also at work on a novel that she hopes will communicate not the gap between the repressive world of post-Revolution Iran and the U.S., but the creeping coalescence. Her articles on Persian literature and her reviews of recent writing on the Middle East have appeared in Critique, Edebiyat, Iranian Studies, Journal of Middle East Studies, and Middle East Report. Her work also appears in A World Between.

Persis M. Karim has been identity-seeking her whole life. She is the daughter of an Iranian father and a French mother and grew up in the San Francisco Bay area. She teaches comparative literature and creative writing at San Jose State University and is the co-author/co-editor of A World Between: Poems, Short Stories, and Essays by Iranian-Americans. She is currently working on a second anthology, Let Me Tell You Where I've Been: New Writing by Women of the Iranian Diaspora.
Abbas Milani is a research fellow and co-director of the Iran Democracy Project at the Hoover Institution. In addition, he is a visiting professor in the Department of Political Science and the Director of Iranian Studies at Stanford University. His expertise is in Iranian cultural, political, and security issues. Milani received his BA in political science and economics from the University of California at Berkeley and his PhD in political science from the University of Hawaii. He has been a professor of history and political science and chair of the department at Notre Dame de Namur University and has taught at the University of California at Berkeley, Tehran University, and the National University of Iran. Milani is the author of The Persian Sphinx: Amir Abbas Hoveyda and the Riddle of the Iranian Revolution (Mage, 2000); Modernity and Its Foes in Iran (Gardon Press, 1998); Tales of Two Cities: A Persian Memoir (Mage, 1996); On Democracy and Socialism, a collection of articles coauthored with Faramarz Tabrizi (Pars Press, 1987); and Malraux and the Tragic Vision (Agah Press, 1982). His latest book is Lost Wisdom: Rethinking Persian Modernity (Mage Publishers, 2004). Milani has also translated numerous books and articles into Persian and English.
Nasrin Rahimieh is Dean of the Faculty of Humanities and Professor of Comparative Literature and English at McMaster University in Toronto, Canada. Her research focuses on intercultural encounters between Iran and the West, modern Persian literature, literature of exile and displacement, women’s writing, and post-revolutionary Iranian cinema. Her publications include Oriental Responses to the West: Comparative Essays on Muslim Writers from the Middle East (Brill, 1990) and Missing Persians: Discovering Voices in Iranian Cultural Heritage (Syracuse University Press, 2001).

Farhang Rajaee is Associate Professor of Political Science and Humanities at Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada. He specializes in political theory and international relations with emphasis in non-Western traditions, particularly modern Islamic political thought. He received a BA degree in political science from the University of Tehran, an MA in public administration from the University of Oklahoma, and a PhD in foreign affairs from the University of Virginia. He has taught at the University of Tehran, the Iranian Academy of Philosophy, and Beheshti (National) University, and he was a fellow at St. Antony’s College, Oxford, and at Zentrum Moderner Orient, Berlin, where he worked on the topic, Globalization and the Islamic World. In his research he concentrates on the notion of the human condition through an understanding of the political conditions in both Western and non-Western traditions. His major works include Moshkeleye Hoviyat-e Iranian Emruz (The Problematique of Contemporary Iranian Identity (2004 and 2005); Globalization on Trial (2000); Ma’rekeye Jahanbiniha (The Battle of Worldviews, 1995 and 1997) Tahavole Andisheye Siyasi dar Sharqe Bastan (The Development of Political Ideas in the Ancient East, 1993). He is currently working on a book on the interaction of Islam and politics in Iran entitled Challenging Modernism: Metamorphoses of the Islamic Discourse in Iran.