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Free Event

The Iranian Studies Initiative at UCSB and Farhang Foundation present

Exile and the Nation

The Parsi Community of India and the Making of Modern Iran

a free live lecture event by Dr. Afshin Marashi

In the aftermath of the seventh-century Islamic conquest of Iran, large numbers of Zoroastrians left Iran to find a new home in India. Known as the Parsis, this community of émigré Iranians slowly lost contact with their ancestral homeland until the nineteenth century, when steam-powered sea and rail travel, the publication and circulation of newly popular Zoroastrian-themed books, and the philanthropic efforts of prosperous Parsi benefactors sparked a new era of interaction between Parsis and Iranians. This talk will trace the cultural and intellectual—as well as the social and economic—exchange that took place between Iranian nationalists and modernizers and India’s Parsi community during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The talk will highlight how the renewed interaction between Parsis and Iranians led to the collective rediscovery of their shared history and to the reimagining of a common Parsi and Iranian national identity. The talk will also detail the collective efforts of Parsi and Iranian intellectuals, scholars, publishers, activists, philanthropists, teachers, doctors, engineers, and entrepreneurs to build on this newly rediscovered shared Parsi-Iranian identity to conceive of new possibilities for collectively building the foundations of a modern and prosperous Iran.

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About Dr. Afshin Marashi

Afshin Marashi is Professor and Farzaneh Family Chair in Modern Iranian History at the University of Oklahoma. From 2011 to 2020, he served as the founding director of the university’s Center for Iranian Studies. He has also served on the editorial boards of the Journal of Persianate Studies and the International Journal of Middle East Studies, as well as on the council of the Association for Iranian Studies. Dr. Marashi’s research focuses on the cultural and intellectual history of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Iranian nationalism, in its comparative, transnational, and global contexts. His most recent book, Exile and the Nation: The Parsi Community of India and the Making of Modern Iran (published by the University of Texas Press), received honorable mention for the Hamid Naficy Iranian Studies Book Award in 2022. He is also the author of Nationalizing Iran: Culture, Power, and the State, 1870-1940 and the co-editor of Rethinking Iranian Nationalism and Modernity, among other works. Dr. Marashi also serves as the co-editor of the book series, “Connected Histories of the Middle East and the Global South” at the University of Texas Press. He completed his undergraduate degree at Berkeley in 1992 and his PhD in History at UCLA in 2003.

The subjects, views, and opinions expressed in the Farhang Foundation Lecture Series are solely those of the speakers and do not necessarily reflect the views or positions of Farhang Foundation.