With Nasrin Rahimieh, University of California, Irvine.

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.

With Fatemeh Shams, Omid Tofighian and Behrouz Boochani.

There is a sense of separation and detachment to every experience of leaving the home to which one feels attached. To this end, forced migration and exile could be considered as a never-ending sense of detachment and separation from one’s homeland; a continual and unstoppable voyage. The traumatic experience of border-crossing, temporality in transient destinations, and a perpetual sense of alienation from the host country(s) are all elements shared by refugee and exiled authors. In this panel, the award-winning, exiled poet-scholar, Fatemeh Shams will be in conversation with the internationally acclaimed, award-winning author, Behrouz Boochani and the literary scholar and translator of Boochani’s work, Omid Tofighian to discuss such themes as one of the major consequences of the Iranian revolution.