New Books in Iranian Studies

Jan 29 2025 106 ep. 56 mins 35
New Books in Iranian Studies Podcast artwork

Interviews with authors and scholars about their new books in Iranian and Persian studies.

  Arts  History  Religion & Spirituality
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Jorge Flores, "Empire of Contingency: How Portugal Entered the Indo-Persian World" (U Pennsylvania Press, 2024)

Jan 29 2025 56 mins  
Portuguese India was tiny—a handful of trading posts and enclaves, centered on the colony of Goa. The Estado da Índia faced the Mughal Empire and the Deccan Sultanates, large Muslim and Persian-based societies that ruled the subcontinent. How did Portuguese India survive? Well, by spying. Jorge Flores in his book Empire of Contingency: How Portugal Entered the Indo-Persian World

Samuel Hodgkin, "Persianate Verse and the Poetics of Eastern Internationalism" (Cambridge UP, 2023)

Dec 12 2024 62 mins  
At the height of literary nationalisms in the twentieth century, leftist internationalists from Turkey, Iran, Afghanistan, India, and the Soviet East bonded over their shared love of the classical Persian verses of Hafiz and Khayyam. At writers' congresses and in communist literary journals, they affirmed their friendship and solidarity with lyric ghazals and ruba'iyat. Persianate

Tristan A. Volpe, "Leveraging Latency: How the Weak Compel the Strong with Nuclear Technology" (Oxford UP, 2023)

Dec 08 2024 72 mins  
Over the last seven decades, some states successfully leveraged the threat of acquiring atomic weapons to compel concessions from superpowers. For many others, however, this coercive gambit failed to work. When does nuclear latency--the technical capacity to build the bomb--enable states to pursue effective coercion? In Leveraging Latency: How the Weak Compel the Strong with Nuclea

Ibn al-Muqaffaʿs "Kalīlah and Dimnah: Fables of Virtue and Vice"

Dec 02 2024 73 mins  
Kalīlah and Dimnah: Fables of Virtue and Vice by Ibn al-Muqaffaʿ, translated by Michael Fishbein and James E. Montgomery, with a foreword by Marina Warner (Library of Arabic Literature, NYU Press, 2022), is a vibrant new rendition of a literary classic that has captivated readers for centuries. Rooted in ancient Indian storytelling and adapted into Arabic literature, this collect

Arash Azizi, "What Iranians Want: Women, Life, Freedom" (Oneworld, 2024)

Oct 23 2024 56 mins  
On Tuesday 13 September 2022, all Mahsa Amini has planned is a day shopping in Tehran. Her birthday is next week. But she is arrested as she comes out of the subway – the Guidance Patrol deem her hijab inadequate. On Friday she is pronounced dead. By Sunday, women have taken to the streets across Iran, setting their headscarves on fire and cursing the Supreme Leader. Months later

Emrah Yildiz, "Zainab's Traffic: Moving Saints, Selves, and Others Across Borders" (U California Press, 2024)

Oct 22 2024 72 mins  
Emrah Yildiz's new book Zainab’s Traffic: Moving Saints, Selves, and Others Across Borders (University of California Press, 2024) is a masterful ethnographic study that maps the religious, political, and economic traffics from Tehran to just outside Damascus to the shrine of Sayyida Zainab’s tomb. Attending to questions of mobility and immobility of pilgrims and contraband acro

Julia Caterina Hartley, "Iran and French Orientalism: Persia in the Literary Culture of Nineteenth-Century France" (Bloomsbury. 2023)

Oct 02 2024 44 mins  
Today I talked to Julia Caterina Hartley about Iran and French Orientalism: Persia in the Literary Culture of Nineteenth-Century France (Bloomsbury. 2023). New translations of Persian literature into French, the invention of the Aryan myth, increased travel between France and Iran, and the unveiling of artefacts from ancient Susa at the Louvre Museum are among the factors that radi

Cyrus Ali Zargar, "Religion of Love: Sufism and Self-Transformation in the Poetic Imagination of ʿaṭṭār" (SUNY Press, 2024)

Aug 21 2024 57 mins  
Farid al-Din ‘Attar’s writings have greatly influenced Persian Sufism, but what do we know of him as a thinker? Engaging his diverse writings from poetry to stories, Cyrus Ali Zargar’s Religion of Live: Sufism and Self-Transformation in the Poetic Imagination of ‘Attar (SUNY Press, 2024) captures for us some of ‘Attar’s worldviews, especially as it is rooted in a Persia

Farshid Emami, "Isfahan: Architecture and Urban Experience in Early Modern Iran" (Penn State UP, 2024)

Aug 17 2024 53 mins  
A vibrant urban settlement from mediaeval times and the royal seat of the Safavid dynasty, the city of Isfahan emerged as a great metropolis during the seventeenth century. Using key sources, Isfahan: Architecture and Urban Experience in Early Modern Iran (Penn State University Press, 2024) reconstructs the spaces and senses of this dynamic city. Focusing on nuances of urban experi

Ibrahim Fraihat, "Iran and Saudi Arabia: Taming a Chaotic Conflict" (Edinburgh UP, 2020)

Jun 09 2024 71 mins  
Ibrahim Fraihat’s latest book, Iran and Saudi Arabia: Taming a Chaotic Conflict (Edinburgh University Press, 2020) is much more than an exploration of the history of animosity between Saudi Arabia and Iran and its debilitating impact on an already volatile Middle East. It is a detailed roadmap for management and resolution of what increasingly looks like an intractable conflict.