This course covers autobiographical writings in Persian from premodern times to contemporary Iran. It reflects the emergence of autobiographical writing in the first days of Islam and an evolving sense of self, identity, and cultural cohesion, and then records transitions within the political/economic power structures in the geographical region.…[Read more]

American Muslims increasingly negotiate their relation to a government that is suspicious of Islam, yet which recognizes them as rights-bearing citizens, within a culture they claim as their own. To better understand how the post-9/11 state is reshaping American Islam, I examine the case of Muslim American dissident Tarek Mehanna, sentenced to…[Read more]

While the cosmopolitan turn in political and literary theory encourages us to move beyond national frameworks, the Caucasus remains mired in ethno-national categories from the Soviet past. This essay examines how these categories are being mobilized in the service of a nominally cosmopolitan agenda in the contemporary memorialization of the writer…[Read more]

How does colonial violence generate anticolonial resistance? Is violence ever justified, whether as an end or as a means? What aesthetic strategies do writers deploy to legitimate the exercise of violence? What is the relationship between militant insurgency and literary form? Posing these and other questions, this course offers an introduction to…[Read more]

This essay examines how translation theory can globalize contemporary literary comparison. Whereas Persian studies has historically been isolated from the latest developments within literary theory, world literature has similarly been isolated from the latest developments within the study of non-European literatures. The methodology of hard…[Read more]