Persian Language Circle

The Persian Circle (Anjoman-e sokhan) is a weekly lecture series in Persian at the University of Chicago’s Center for Middle Eastern Studies. The lectures include social, cultural and academic discussions about the Persian-speaking world and is led by faculty, students, and visiting scholars and artists. The opinions of the speakers are their own. 

January 10 - Archeology of nomadic life in Iran (Abbas Alizadeh)

January 17 - Iranian Women, Religiosity, and Civil Disobedience in Iran (Zahra Khosh Jan)

January 24 - The Genesis of Court Ottoman Turkish in the 15th-16th centuries (Darragh Winkelman)

February 7 - Alcohol in the Islamic World: Beyond Hypocrisy and Forbidden Fruit (Rudolph Matthee)

February 14 - Iran and Transnational Solidarity (Elmira Louie)

February 21 - Documenting the Shughni language: Some differences and similarities with Persian (Clinton Parker)

October 4 - A linguistic approach to classical prosody (Darragh Winkelman)

October 11 - A poet in exile: the life and work of Fazel Ahad Ahadi (Fazel Ahad Ahadi)

October 18 - A Personal History of Mashhad (Ameena Yovan)

November 1 - From Abel to Cain: A short account of the formation of Iranian cinema and the struggle between commercial and intellectual cinema (Aref Mohammadi)

November 8 - Iranian women and gender in the Iran-Iraq War (Mateo Mohammad Farzaneh)

November 15 - "You Wrote This Poem," Shared Pain and an Overnight Anthem Called Baraye (Behzad Borhani)

November 27 - TBA (Ali Boozari)