The Center for Middle Eastern Studies
THE IRANIAN REVOLUTION: THIRTY YEARS
FEBRUARY 7- 8, 2009 Rutgers University New Brunswick The Center for Middle Eastern Studies
THE IRANIAN REVOLUTION: THIRTY YEARS
FEBRUARY 7- 8, 2009 Rutgers University New Brunswick The Center for Middle Eastern Studies at Rutgers University welcomes you to the Douglass Campus Center in New Brunswick for:
The Iranian Revolution: Thirty Years
All panels will be held in Trayes Hall B on the first floor of the Douglass Campus Center. For the schedule of the panels and the biographies of the speakers, see pp3-5 and pp7-22, respectively.
In addition to the panels of the conference, there is also a photography exhibition in the Douglass Lounge, on the second floor of the Douglass Campus Center. The biographies of the photographers, Matt Kaelin and Randy H. Goodman, are included on pp23-24 of this program. Entrance to their exhibitions is free of charge.
Vendors specializing in books and products related to Iran are represented in the main foyer of the campus center on the first floor near the central staircase. Please take advantage of the opportunity to examine and purchase what interests you.
1 Special Events During the Conference:
At 8.30 pm on Saturday 7th February, 2009, in Trayes Hall B, there will be a concert by Haale, whose biography can be found on p24 of this program (Tickets $10/$5 students with ID).
At 10.30 am on Sunday 8th February, 2009, there will be a special screening of the documentary The Mist, directed by Dr Maryam Habibian. This will take place in Meeting Room B on the second floor of the Douglass Campus Center (please refer to pp25-26 for her biography and a description of the documentary). Dr Habibian will be present herself to take questions from the audience immediately afterwards. Although there is no entrance fee, registration for this screening at the main registration desk is required, due to limited seating.
*Please be advised that the previously advertised conference dinner at Wood Lawn Mansion has completely sold out. Coffee, tea, lunch and dinner will be available for purchase during the conference at the Douglass Café, at the opposite end to Trayes Hall on the first floor of the Douglass Campus Center.
This conference is made possible by a Title VIa UISFL Grant awarded to the Center for Middle Eastern Studies by the US Department of Education.
2 SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 7, 2009 8.45 Registration and Opening Remarks Joanna Regulska, Dean of International Programs Jawid Mojaddedi, Director, CMES 9.15-9.45 CONFERENCE KEYNOTE ADDRESS Ervand Abrahamian, Baruch College, CUNY The Islamic Republic after Thirty Years 9.50-11.10 RELIGION AND POLITICS: RELIGIOSITY AND THE LAW Chair: Charles Häberl Kambiz Behi, Harvard University Iran’s “New Constitutionalism” Reza Akbari, Freedom House The Role of the Guardian Council within the Iranian Government Gunes Tezcur, Loyola University, Chicago Religiosity and Political Rule in the Islamic Republic 11.10-11.30 Coffee Break 11.30-12.30 RELIGION AND POLITICS: OPPOSITIONAL MOVEMENTS Chair: Catherine Sameh Babak Rahimi, University of California, San Diego Shi‘a Iranian Politics after 30 Years of Revolution Mehrdad Mashayekhi, Georgetown University Transformations of the Post-Revolutionary Oppositional Political Discourse 12.30-1.30pm Lunch Break 1.30—3.30 CHANGES IN IRANIAN SOCIETY Chair: Mirjam Künkler Kevan Harris, Johns Hopkins University State-Making, War-Making, and Welfare-Making: The Ad Hoc Consolidation of the Islamic Republic of Iran Mustafa El-Labbad, East Center for Regional and Strategic Studies, Cairo The role of Family relations in revolutionary Iran Kjetil Selvik, University of Oslo Iran’s Industrial Entrepreneurs since the 1979 Revolution
3 Sina Mossayeb, Columbia University Iran’s Intellectual Drain: The Challenges of Developing an Intellectual Community under the Islamic Republic of Iran Julien Pelissier, University of Toulouse The Impact of the Revolution on Iran's Finance Industry 3.30-3.50 Coffee Break 3.50-4.45 WOMEN IN POST-REVOLUTIONARY IRAN Chair: Zakia Salime Firoozeh Kashani-Sabet, University of Pennsylvania Civil Liberties, Civic Wombs: Women and Maternalism in the Islamic Republic Hamideh Sedghi, Harvard University Cyber-feminism and the Politics of Resistance in Iran: The One Million Signatures Campaign. 4.50-5.45 LITERATURE IN POST-REVOLUTIONARY IRAN Chair: Paul Sprachman Marek Smurzynski, Jagiellonian University, Cracow Pain as a rule of the social order in Abu Torab Khosravi's Rud-e ravi A. Korangy Isfahani, University of Virginia What does Da'i Jan Napelon mean now? 5.45 -6.15 DAY ONE CLOSING LECTURE Fatemeh Keshavarz, Washington University Women Shaping Literature and Art: A Glimpse of Post- Revolutionary Iran 8.30 HAALE IN CONCERT (ticketed event, $10 / $5 with Student ID, at the door, Trayes Hall)
4 SUNDAY, FEBRUARY 8, 2009 9.00-12.00 SPECIAL FACULTY WORKSHOP SESSION: RESEARCH AND TEACHING ABOUT THE REVOLUTION Chair: Ahmad Ashraf Ali Banuazizi, Boston College Interpreting the Iranian Revolution Three Decades Later Mark Gould, Haverford College Theorizing the revolution 10.20-10.40 Coffee Break Janet Bauer, Trinity College Imagining the Masses: The Lived Consequences of Misreading the Iranian Revolution Peter Chelkowski, New York University Art at the Service of the Revolution 12.00-1.00 Lunch Break 1.00-2.45 INTERNATIONAL ISSUES Chair: Peter Golden Trita Parsi, National Iranian-American Council Iran’s Post-Revolution Foreign Policy – Continuity or Change? George Sanikidze, Tbilisi State University Iran and the South Caucasus Radwan Ziadeh, Harvard University The Syrian – Iranian Relationship after the Revolution Rasmus Elling, University of Copenhagen The Legacy of Khomeini: Questions of Ethnicity, Nation and National Identity 2.50-3.30 CLOSING LECTURE Mehdi Bozorgmehr, City College, CUNY Iranians in Amrika
5 THE MIST Special Screening of the documentary about modern Iran by Maryam Habibian, Ph.d. Sunday February 8th, 10.30 am Meeting Room B, Second Floor, Douglass Student Center Q & A to follow
Title: The Mist Country and area filmed: Iran, Tehran, Shahrood, Misty Mountains (North of Iran) Dates: Shooting was done in the summers of 2004 and 2005 and editing was completed in June 2008 Running time: 48 minutes Director & writer: Maryam Habibian Producers: Maryam Habibian & Brian Kehrer (Reflecting Pool) Contact Dr. Habibian at: 212-799-1321. cell: 646-823-7983. e-mail: [email protected]
6 Ervand Abrahamian Ervand Abrahamian (B.A., M.A., Oxford University; Ph.D. Columbia University), an Armenian born in Iran and raised in England, is well qualified by education and experience to teach world and Middle East history. He has published Iran Between Two Revolutions, The Iranian Mojahedin, Khomeinism, Tortured Confessions, and Inventing the Axis of Evil. He teaches at the CUNY Graduate Center, and has taught at Princeton, New York University, and Oxford University. He is currently working on two books: one on The CIA Coup in Iran; and another, A History of Modern Iran, for Cambridge University Press.
Kambiz Behi PhD candidate in social anthropology, Harvard University; BA in Political Science, Ohio University (2000); BA in History, Ohio University (2000); MA in Regional Studies, Harvard University (2003); MA in social anthropology, Harvard University (2006). Kambiz Behi’s research interests include legal anthropology, law and sociology, and constitutionalism. He has published “The Real in Resistance: Transgression of Law as Ethical Act” and “Who Is At Risk? Humanitarian Law in the Aftermath of Bam Earthquake”. He is also working on Iran’s “New Constitutionalism”: The Emergence of Expediency Discernment Council; The Formation of Shiite Legal Formalism; and Islamic Constitutionalism? 7 Reza Akbari Reza H. Akbari, a Program Assistant at Freedom House, conducts research on US foreign policy towards Iran and the Middle East. During his career he has focused on Iranian domestic politics and how it affects the broader Middle East region vis-a-vis US/Iran relations. Before his work with Freedom House, he served as a researcher at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. Reza completed a double major in Political Science and International Studies at the State University of New York. His bachelor’s thesis focuses on the effects of national identity and “cultural confusion” among Iranians as one of the root causes of their continual failure to construct a viable democratic political structure in Iran. Reza has written editorials which were printed in Gulf News. Reza was born and raised in Tehran, Iran. He currently resides in Washington, DC.
Güneş Murat Tezcür Güneş Murat Tezcür, PhD in Political Science (University of Michigan 2005). Assistant Professor of Political Science at Loyola University, Chicago (2005-). Conducts research on political roles of constitutionalism and judicial activism, and dynamics of ethnic conflicts with a particular focus on Iran, Turkey, and the Kurds. Author of a book tentatively entitled, "The Paradox of Moderation: Muslim Reformers in Iran and Turkey," forthcoming at the University of Texas Press. Recent publications include articles in Law and Society Review, Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, Party Politics, Polity, and Critical Middle Eastern Studies.
8 Babak Rahimi Assistant Professor of Iranian and Islamic Studies: Shi'i Islam; Medieval and (early) modern Iranian culture and society, public sphere, civil society; Democracy and modernity. Babak Rahimi, who earned his BA at UCSD, received a Ph.D from the European University Institute, Florence, Italy, in October 2004. Rahimi has also studied at the University of Nottingham, where he obtained a M.A. in Ancient and Medieval Philosophy, and the London School of Economics and Political Science, where he was a Visiting Fellow at the Department of Anthropology, 2000-2001. Rahimi has written numerous articles on culture, religion and politics and regularly writes on contemporary Iraqi and Iranian politics. He has been the recipient of fellowships from the national endowment for the Humanities and a Jean Monnet Fellowship at the European University Institute, and was a Senior Fellow at the United States Institute of Peace, Washington DC, where he conducted research on the institutional contribution of Shi’i political organizations in the creation of a vibrant civil society in post-Baathist Iraq. Rahimi’s current research project is on the religious cultural life of the Iranian port-city of Busher, southern Iran.
Mehrdad Mashayekhi Mehrdad Mashayekhi was born in Tehran, Iran and has resided in the U.S. since 1972. He received a. B.A. and M.A. in economics (Case Western Reserve University, 1976, Cleveland, and The American University, 1979, Washington D.C.), and a Ph.D. in Sociology from The American University, in 1986.
9 Mashayekhi is a Visiting Assistant Professor at Georgetown University. He joined the Department of Sociology and Anthropology in 1989 and has alternately taught as adjunct and visiting positions. His courses include: Introduction to Sociology, Political Sociology, Globalization and Social Change in Developing Countries, Social Inequality, Social Movements, Politics and Culture in Postrevolutionary Iran, and Sociology of Democratization and Authoritarianism.
Dr. Mashayekhi's research focus is postrevolutionary Iran, on specific subjects such as; student movement, Islamic reformism, Civil society and democratization, political culture, and current political affairs. He is coeditor of Political Culture in the Islamic Republic (Routledge, 1992).
His new book (in Persian) titled Towards Democracy, a Secular Republic in Iran: Essays in Political Sociology was published in May 2007. His article titled "Culture of Mistrust: A Sociological Analysis of Iranian Political Culture" appeared in the Blackwell Companion to Contemporary Islamic Thought (2006). His latest article, "Islamic Reformism," appeared in 2008 in Iran Today: An Encyclopedia of Life in the Islamic Republic.
Mashayekhi is a regular contributor to Persian T.V. and radio programs on political and sociological developments in Iran as well as the diaspora. They include: Voice of America, BBC, Deutche Welle & Radio Australia.
10 Kevan Harris Kevan Harris was born in Ahvaz, Iran in 1978, grew up outside of Chicago, IL, and first returned to Iran in 2006. He has a B.A. in Political Science and Economics from Northwestern University, and an M.A. in Sociology from Johns Hopkins University. Kevan is currently working towards his Ph.D. in Sociology at Johns Hopkins University, with his dissertation focusing on the political economy of the Iranian welfare state.
Mustafa El-Labbad Dr Mustafa El-Labbad received his Dr. Phil. in political economy from Humboldt University, Berlin, Germany. He is the Director of the al-Sharq Center in Cairo, a think tank for decision-makers in the Arab world, and also Editor-in-Chief of Sharqnameh, an Arabic journal which focuses on Iran, Turkey, and Central Asia. Dr El-Labbad has also been a consultant for many Arab NGOs on Iran, Turkey, and Central Asia, and has worked previously as a journalist at the Middle Eastern News Agency in Cairo, and for many Arabic newspapers. He is the author of Gardens of sadness: Iran and Velayet-e Faqih, as well as numerous articles in Arabic and English, including articles in Arabic newspapers such as: Al-Hayat; Al-Ahram, and Al-Ahram Weekly. He is also a regular contributor to Arab television channels, such as Al Jazeera in Qatar, Al Horra in America, and
Nile News in Egypt. 11 Kjetil Selvik Kjetil Selvik is Assistant Professor at the University of Oslo and Researcher at the Fafo Institute of Applied International Studies. He earned his PhD in political science from l’Institut d’Etudes Politiques in Paris in 2004 with the thesis Théocratie et capitalisme: Les entrepreneurs industriels de la République islamique d’Iran.
Sina Mossayeb
Sina Mossayeb is a doctoral candidate at Teachers College, Columbia University in the Department of International and Transcultural Studies with a concentration in Political Science. Sina focuses his research on education policies in the Middle East, and particularly looks at the contentious politics of education, education movements, and equity issues in general. He has contributed to developing a Middle East focus in the field of Comparative and International Studies, including the formation of the Middle East and Muslim World Education Society and the Middle East Special Interest Group of the Comparative and International Education Society.
12 Julien Etienne Pelissier
Julien Etienne Pelissier’s research interests include: Islamic law and economics from a shi'a perspective and its related debate in contemporary Iran; and Islamic finance theory and its application in Iran after the 1979 revolution. He is currently completing his PhD at the Université de Toulouse Mirail, Toulouse, under the supervision of Pr.Dominique Urvoy, islamologist and Arabic teacher. He has previously studied at the Imam Sadeq's University in Tehran and has worked for the French Petroleum Institute.
Firoozeh Kashani-Sabet Firoozeh Kashani-Sabet received her B.A. from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where she was a Morehead Scholar. She completed her M.A., M.Phil., and Ph.D. in history at Yale University. Her book, Frontier Fictions: Shaping the Iranian Nation, 1804-1946 (Princeton University Press, 1999) discusses Iranian nationalism and analyzes the significance of land and border disputes, with attention to Iran's shared boundaries with the Ottoman Empire (later Iraq and Turkey), Central Asia, Afghanistan, and the Persian Gulf region. Her book is being translated into Persian by Kitabsara Press, Tehran, Iran. Professor Kashani-Sabet teaches courses on various aspects of modern Middle Eastern history, including ethnic and political conflicts, gender and women's issues, popular culture, diplomatic history, revolutionary
13 revolutionary ideologies, and general surveys. She is finishing a book entitled, Conceiving Citizens: Women, Sexuality, and Religion in Modern Iran. She is also completing a book on America 's historical relationship with Iran and the Islamic world.
Hamideh Sedghi Hamideh Sedghi is a Visiting Scholar at the Center for Middle Eastern Studies and Professor of Government at Harvard University’s E-School. She has also been a consultant to the United Nations and its Division for the Advancement of Women. The first Iranian woman who published works on women in Iran from a social science perspective in the United States, Hamideh Sedghi has written extensively on women/gender in Iran. She has also contributed works on American foreign policy in the Middle East, perception of Muslims in the West, international political economy and women, and global feminisms. Her most recent work is Women And Politics In Iran: Veling,Unveiling And Reveiling, Cambridge University Press, published in July 2007 and re-printed in December 2007. Her current projects include a monograph, Failed Secularism and Failed State Under the Pahlavis, an anthology, Gender and Globalization:Critical Perspectives, and another anthology, De- Gendering National Security in
14 Iran: The One Million Signatures Campaign and the State. Her various awards include those from the (Pennsylvania) State System for Higher Education (SHEE), and the National Endowment for the Humanities, as well as the 2005 Christian Bay Award for the Best Paper presented at the American Political Science Association. She is currently the editor of Women/Politics, the Women and Politics Section of the American Political Science.
Marek Smurzyński Marek Smurzynski, Ph.D., a graduate of Lodz (M.A. in Theory of Literature), Warsaw (M.A. In Iranian Studies) and Tehran Universities
(Ph.D. in Iranian Studies). From 1999 the lecturer of Persian language and literature at The Institute of Oriental Philology of The Jagiellonian University in Cracow (Poland). His interests can be grouped within the three main fields of research: 1) the text and its cultural authority (“The Anthropological Aspect of Manuscripts’ Multiplicity in Persian” in: Iran. Questions et Connaissances. Vol. II, Paris 2002; “The Parataxis of Persian Narration and the Problems of the Segmentation of a Translated Text” in: Oriental Languages in Translation. Polish Academy of Sciences Press, vol.24, Cracow 2002), 2) the generative power of narrative and lyrical modes of the mythico-mystical discourse in verbalizing the other kinds of discourses and modeling the perception of the world and the text (“Paradigms of Movement in Ali Shariati” in: Hemispheres, Studies on
15 Cultures and Societes No 6, 1989 pp. 33-59; “The Description of Spatial Relations in the ‘ Aql-e Sorkh’ of Shahab al-Din Yahya Sohravardi as Mystical Mind Training” in: Erzahlter Raum in Literaturen der islamischen Welt/ Narrated Space in the Literature of the Islamic World. Ed. by Roxane Haag-Higuchi and Christian Szyska. Harrassowitz Verlag. Wiesbaden 2001), 3) Iranian postmodern literature (The Postmodern Novel in the Post-Revolutionary Iran, paper delivered at The V European Conference SIE in Ravenna, Italy, October 6-11 2003, published in: L’Iran e il tempo. Una societa complessa. Jouvence, Roma 2008).
Alireza Korangy Isfahani Alireza Korangy Isfahani recieved his Ph.D. from the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations at Harvard University. Since then, he has taught at the Univeristy of Colorado at Boulder and is currently a tenure-track Assistant Professor at the University of Virginia. His dissertation treated the linguistics, poetics, and the rhetoric of the ghazal and its development from the pre-Islamic period up to the enigmatic and very difficult Persian poet in the twelfth-century Khaqani Shirvani (d. 1198). His research interests are in contemporary Iranian linguistics, Semitic philology, Historical linguistics, Poetics, and specifically 12th century Persian poetry. Currently he is working on a project engaging martyrology and its cultural syntax.
Fatemeh Keshavarz Chair of the Department of Asian and Near Eastern Languages and Literatures (Washington University, St. Louis), Fatemeh Keshavarz is a published poet and author of five books including Reading Mystical 16 Lyric: the Case of Jalal al-Din Rumi and Recite in the Name of the Red Rose: Poetic Sacred Making in Twentieth Century Iran (winners, Choice Magazine Award). She has had 37 national signings for her latest book Jasmines and Stars: Reading more than Lolita in Tehran, a counterpoint to Nafisi’s Reading Lolita in Tehran. Keshavarz has spoken at the UN General Assembly and on various NPR programs. The show “Speaking of Faith” featuring her in the hour-long episode “The Ecstatic Faith of Rumi,” received the Peabody Award. Keshavarz was awarded the Hershel Walker Peace & Justice Award by People’s Weekly.
Ali Banuazizi Ali Banuazizi is Professor of Political Science at Boston College and Director of the Program in Islamic Civilization and Societies. After receiving his Ph.D. from Yale University in 1968, he taught at Yale and the University of Southern California before joining the Boston College Faculty in 1971. Since then, he has held visiting appointments at Tehran University, Princeton, Harvard, Oxford University, and M.I.T.
He served as the Editor of the journal of Iranian Studies, from 1968 to 1982, and is a past President of the International Society for Iranian Studies and the Middle East Studies Association of North America (MESA). Ali Banuazizi is the author of numerous articles on society, culture, and politics in Iran and the Middle East, and the coeditor (with Myron Weiner) of 17 three books on politics, religion and society in Southwest and Central Asia, including The State, Religion, and Ethnic Politics in Afghanistan, Iran, and Pakistan (1986), The Politics of Social Transformation in Afghanistan, Iran, and Pakistan (1994), and The New Geopolitics of Central Asia and Its Borderlands (1994). His forthcoming book is tentatively titled Sacrificing the Self and Others in the Way of God.
Mark Gould Mark Gould is Professor of Sociology and Chair of the Department at Haverford College. He is a social theorist; consequently, he has written about many topics. Currently, he is writing about the logic of religious commitment and its consequences in Islam, Islamic constitutionalism, the role of reason in Christianity and Islam, about a group of people, including Kemal A. Faruki, who have attempted to reconstruct Islam(ic law), and about the genesis and development of Islamic religious and political movements.
Janet Bauer
Janet Bauer is Associate Professor of International studies and former Director of the Women, Gender and Sexuality Program at Trinity College. Since she conducted fieldwork on rural-urban migration in Iran, her research and publications have focused on the consequences of transnational migration for gender and community in Muslim diaspora sites.
18 Peter Chelkowski Peter J. Chelkowski joined the faculty of NYU as a cultural historian of the Middle East in 1968. His academic background is an intensely multi- cultural, multi-disciplined one. He studied Oriental Philology at the Jagiellonian University in Cracow and Theater Arts in the School of Drama in the same city.
After he moved to London, he studied Islamic Middle Eastern History and Culture at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS). Finally, he went to Tehran University to study Persian Literature. While in Iran, he also worked for a charitable organization called CARE Mission. This allowed him to cover Iran to and fro to the tune of some seventy thousand miles and to meet all classes of people in the country in a practical capacity. His teaching and writings reflect that education and experience in the field. Within the framework of Islam, whether in the area of Islamic mysticism or that of popular beliefs and rituals, his scholarly interests range from the many and varied uses of the language itself to the role of Islam in architecture and the relation of art to society. In his graduate courses dealing with Islam in the contemporary world, he is primarily concerned with rectifying Western misconceptions of Islam both as a religion and in its various cultural forms. His love of the performing arts further led him to the Caribbean basin, where in recent years he has been tracing a religious ritual called Hosay which began in the Shi`i Muslim Middle East and was brought to the Caribbean by East Indian indentured laborers, where it has come to co-exist with Carnival.
19 Trita Parsi Dr. Trita Parsi is the author of Treacherous Alliance - The Secret Dealings of Iran, Israel and the United States (Yale University Press, 2007), recipient of the Council on Foreign Relation's 2008 Arthur Ross Silver Medallion, the most prestigious award for books on international politics. He wrote his Doctoral thesis on Israeli-Iranian relations under Professors Francis Fukuyama, Zbigniew Brzezinski and R. K. Ramazani at Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies. He is regularly requested to advise European, American and Asian governments on developments in the Middle East. He is a frequent guest on CNN, BBC World News, MSNBC, PBS News Hour and his publications have appeared in the Financial Times, the International Herald Tribune, the Washington Times, the Christian Science Monitor to name a few. He is currently the President of the National Iranian American Council (NIAC), the largest Iranian-American organization in the US.
George Sanikidze George Sanikidze is the Director of the G. Tsereteli Institute of Oriental Studies and Professor at the Iv. Javakhishvili Tbilisi State University – Head of the Department of the Middle East History (Tbilisi, Georgia). The research field of G. Sanikidze includes Medieval and Modern history of the Middle Eastern countries (especially Iran) and the Caucasus. 20 Radwan Ziadeh
Radwan Ziadeh is visiting scholar at Carr Center for Human Rights at Harvard University. He was a Senior Fellow at United States Institute of Peace (USIP) – Washington, DC, and he is the founder and director of the Damascus Center for Human Rights Studies. Before that, Ziadeh was editor of Tyarat magazine in 2001-2002 and is currently a secretary of the Syrian Organization for Transparency. He was a researcher with the UNDP project "Syria 2025" and was named best researcher in the Arab world in political science by Jordan’s Abdulhameed Shoman Foundation in 2004. He presented many lectures in a number of institutions and universities, and participated in many local and international conferences in many places around the World. Ziadeh has published studies, research projects and articles in local and international magazines in Arabic, English, Spanish and French. He has also written for a wide range of Arabic publications including Al-Hayat (a London-based Arabic newspaper) as well as Almustaqbal, an-Nahar in Lebanon, Alghad in Jordan, and Al-Ahram in Cairo. He is a frequent political commentator to several U.S, European, and Middle East Media like Aljazeera, Alarabiya, B.B.C and Alhura. Ziadeh regularly contributes articles in Arabic to various academic Journals. He also writes a bimonthly op-ed for the leading Arab daily Al-Hayat.
21 Rasmus Elling Rasmus Elling is a PhD fellow at University of Copenhagen, Denmark, where he is currently working on a dissertation on the politics of ethnic and national identity in post- revolutionary Iran. He is fluent in Persian, has taught Iranian history, Persian language and Middle Eastern & Central Asian Studies for four years and he has lived and studied in Iran. For the spring term 2009, he will join the Hagop Kevorkian Center, New York University, as a visiting researcher. He regularly contributes to Danish and international media and his publications includes ‘State of Mind, State of Order: Reactions to Ethnic Unrest in the Islamic Republic of Iran’ (Studies in Ethnicity and Nationalism, Vol. 8, No. 3, 2008) and ‘Reviewing and Redefining the Student Movement in Iran’ (Humanization of Education International Journal, vol. I, 2008).
Mehdi Bozorgmehr Mehdi Bozorgmehr is Associate Professor of Sociology at the City College and the Graduate Center, City University of New York (GC, CUNY), and the founding Co-Director of the Middle East and Middle Eastern American Center at the GC, CUNY. He is the co-author, with Anny Bakalian, of Backlash 9/11: Middle Eastern and Muslim Americans Respond (University of California Press, 2009), and more than two dozen articles on Iranian Americans. 22 Matt Kaelin Photographer Matt Kaelin was born in New York, New York in 1980. He attended a high school run by Benedictine monks in Newark, NJ and began documenting their lives after graduating from Swarthmore College in Swarthmore, PA in 2005. His work is concerned with gaining access to insular communities and subverting expected depictions through subjective point of view. He is currently working with Iranian diaspora communities in the US. Randy H. Goodman Photojournalist
Randy H. Goodman began her photojournalist career in Iran. In 1980 she covered a grassroots delegation of Americans invited to meet with the people holding the US hostages. A year later, she and veteran journalist William Worthy, Jr, returned to Iran on assignment for CBS News. During their third trip to Iran in 1983, Randy freelanced for Time magazine. Her Iran photographs have been published in newspapers and magazines throughout the world including The New York Times, The Boston Globe, The L.A. Times, The Washington Post and Time. She was interviewed on CNN and NBC’s Today Show about her Iran experiences. Besides Iran, Randy has photographed in Nicaragua, Cuba, Barbados and Grenada, where she and Worthy investigated the 1979 overthrow of Grenadian Prime Minister Maurice Bishop. In the early ‘90s, she was a freelance photographer for United Press International covering metropolitan Boston. She has photographed such 23 notable personalities as Senators Barack Obama and Ted Kennedy, the Reverend Jesse Jackson, Meryl Streep, Billy Joel, Stevie Wonder and members of the Boston Red Sox and Boston Celtics. Randy holds a B.A. in sociology and a M.A. in political economy from Boston University. She lives with her husband Matt Schneps and their two teenage children in Cambridge, MA.
Haale Haale is a Bronx-born woman of Iranian descent whose name means the 'halo around the moon.' Her songs are trance-inducing, rhythmically propulsive, and lyrically engaging tapestries that draws on both Persian mystical and American psychedelic musical traditions. She released two mesmerizing EPs in January 2007: 'Morning' and 'Paratrooper‘ and spent the year touring across the country and in Europe, at venues such as the Bonnaroo Festival, SXSW, and the Mimi Festival in France. She performed at David Byrne's Nonesuch-sponsored series at Carnegie Hall, recorded with Sean Lennon (on 'Before the Skies'), and shared the stage with such diverse artists as the legendary Hugh Masakela and Odetta. While back at home from touring, Haale and producer/percussionist Matt Kilmer went to work on their first full-length debut, 'No Ceiling,' to be released on March 18, 2008. The album features players Shahzad Ismaily, Mike Gamble, Doug Wieselman, Chris Hoffman, and Johnny Gandlesman and co-writing by Dougie Bowne.
24 Maryam Habibian Actress, Artistic Director, Translator, Writer & Scholar Maryam Habibian is a filmmaker with a Ph.D. in Educational Theater from NYU. Her latest work is a feature documentary, The Mist, which follows the filmmaker on a journey of discovery in the land of her birth. Dr. Habibian first got the idea for this film in summer 2002, while in Tehran doing NEH-funded research on iconic Iranian poet Forugh Farrokhzad and her relationship to the city of Tehran. The resulting documentary short, “Forugh Farrokhzad: Young Revolutionary Poetess of Tehran”, has been screened at the Library of Congress, at a gathering of women filmmakers in Tribeca, at the University of Sussex in England, at the CCHA conference in Santa Fe, and at the Bowery Poetry Club in New York City. Other directorial credits include her multimedia play “Forugh’s Reflecting Pool”, which was performed at various venues in NYC and New Jersey, including the Graduate Center at CUNY, the Williams Art Center, the Bluestockings Women’s Bookstore and Café, Queensborough Community College in Queens, and Bellevue Community College in Seattle. This play was subsequently published in the anthology Shattering the Stereotypes: Muslim Women Speak Out (Olive Branch Press: Massachusetts, 2005). She also directed "The Ugly Older Sister” (which she adapted from the short story by Sadegh Hedayat) at NYU's Black Box Theatre, as well as a production of "The Invitation" and "Blessed Are the Meek” at the off-off Broadway Expanded Arts Theater. (The last two were written by Dr. Gholamhoseyn Sa'edi and translated by Dr. Habibian in collaboration with Lois Becker.)
25 The Mist is a video documentary which explores life and culture in present day Iran through a series of interviews with Iranian women and young people. The Iranian-American filmmaker Maryam Habibian takes us on this journey in hopes of opening eyes to a reality that is far more complex and human than that generally portrayed in the Western media. Behind the hejab (Islamic covering or veil), behind closed doors, Iranians live their second, private life. The Mist unmasks this side of Iranian life to which Western cameras have little or no access. Today, more than 70 per cent of Iran’s population is under 40 years of age. Despite the limitations imposed by society, the Iranian youth has created its own culture of fashion, work, love, marriage, and ideas; pushing dress codes, taking new occupations, and choosing their own partners. And despite what the Western audience may think about the state of women’s rights in Iran, women from all walks of life function as successful, creative and autonomous beings, making up a large portion of the work force and over half of the university population, owning their own businesses, keeping their maiden names, and even serving in Parliament. The Mist reveals the contradictions that are a perpetual part of life in Iran, and in doing so directly challenges the monolithic images presented by the Western media. Women poets play an important role in “The Mist”, with their poems, which speak directly to the dualities which lie at the heart of the film. The film culminates with a scenic trip to the cloud-filled mountains of Northern Iran, where the atmospheric mist presents a striking metaphor for the mystery of Iran, alternately obscuring and revealing the two faces of Iranian society, the public face and the private, the one with the veil and the one without.
26 Center for Middle Eastern Studies Rutgers University Lucy Stone Hall, B316 54 Joyce Kilmer Avenue Piscataway, NJ 08854 Tel: (732) 445-8444 Fax: (732) 445-8446 [email protected] www.mideast.rutgers.edu