Events

This virtual lecture series is dedicated to exploring how Iranian diaspora authors reflect on the community’s attempts at carving out forms of belonging to their host nations. Authors and discussants may address specific modes of power and representation that Iranian diaspora community has developed to rehabilitate their position as members of a minoritized population with ambivalent feelings of belonging.

Shahriar Mandanipour is an Iranian American writer, literary theorist, and essayist. He is the author of 13 books – his fourteenth book, Seasons of Purgatory, a collection of short stories is forthcoming from Bellevue Literary Press in the winter of 2022. He also has authored more than 100 essays in literature, art criticism, and the effect of social and political injunctions on literary censorship. Mandanipour’s creative approach to the use of symbols and metaphors, his inventive experimentation with language, time and space, and his unique awareness of sequence and identity have made his work fascinating to critics and readers. His honors include the Mehregan Award for the best Iranian children’s novel of 2004, the 1998 Golden Tablet Award for best fiction in Iran during the previous two decades, and Best Film Critique at the 1994 Press Festival in Tehran. From 1999 until 2007, he was Editor-in-Chief of Asr-e Panjshanbeh (Thursday Evening), a monthly literary journal published in Shiraz that after 9 years of publishing was banned. Some of his short stories and essays have been published in anthologies such as Strange Times, My Dear: The PEN Anthology of Contemporary Iranian Fiction and Sohrab’s Wars: Counter Discourses of Contemporary Persian Fiction: A Collection of Short Stories and a Film Script; and in journals such as The Kenyon Review, The Literary Review, and Virginia Quarterly Review. Works have been published in France, Germany, Denmark, and in languages such Arabic, Turkish, and Kurdish.

Mehrak Kamali in Conversation with author Shahriar Mandanipour
Register: https://go.unc.edu/Mandanipour

Convener: Dr. Claudia Yaghoobi, Roshan Associate Professor in Persian Studies, yaghoobi@email.unc.edu

Presented by Persian Studies at UNC-Chapel Hill. Cosponsors: American Institute of Iranian Studies, Department of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies, Center for Middle East and Islamic Studies, Iranian Cultural Society of North Carolina.

UNC-Chapel Hill