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Farhang Foundation proudly presents

From Persia to Iran:

A Modern Story

A Lecture By Professor Ali Mirsepassi, New York University

A FREE In-Person Event

USC’s Doheny Memorial Library, Lecture Hall DML 240

October 16, 2023 - 4 PM

In a decisive turning point, in December1934, Iran’s government asked foreign missions in Tehran to desist from using the name “Persia” in favour of “Iran.” What were the political intentions and cultural consequences of such a diplomatic move? The conventional view explains the name change by pointing to Reza Shah's affinity for the racist-nationalist ideology of Nazi Germany. This lecture challenges the above commonly held view and offers a far richer interpretation of the name change. It argues that during the “interwar’ period Iran was faced with an existential crisis and the name change was rooted in the intellectuals attempt by Iranian nationalists to “re-discover” a cosmopolitan “idea of Iran.” The discovery of a modern Iran emanated from a transnational experience of community of Iranian émigrés, activists, and scholars in 1920s Weimar Berlin, and later in Iran until the mid 1930s.

Parking:
620 USC McCarthy Way, Los Angeles, CA 90089
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Two Hour Parking $8
Daily Pass: $20

About Professor Ali Mirsepassi

Ali Mirsepassi is Albert Gallatin Research Excellence Professor of Middle Eastern and Islamic studies at Gallatin and in the Department of Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies in the Faculty of Arts and Science. He is also director of Iranian Studies Initiative at NYU. In addition, he is affiliated faculty at the NYU Sociology department in the Faculty of Arts of Science. He was a 2007-2009 Carnegie Scholar.

He is the co-editor, with Arshin Adib-Moghadam, of The Global Middle East, a book series published by the Cambridge University Press. His teaching and research interests include social theories of modernity, Iranian intellectual history, political Islam, modern Islamic thought, and sociology of religion. He is the author of Iran’s Troubled Modernity: Debating Ahmad Fardid’s Legacy (Cambridge University Press, 2018), Transnationalism in Iranian Political Thought: The Life and Thought of Ahmad Fardid (Cambridge University Press, 2017), co-author, with Tadd Fernee, of Islam, Democracy, and Cosmopolitanism (Cambridge University Press, 2014); is the author of Political Islam, Iran and Enlightenment (Cambridge University Press, 2011), Democracy in Modern Iran (New York University Press, 2010), Intellectual Discourses and Politics of Modernization: Negotiating Modernity in Iran (Cambridge University Press, 2000), and Truth or Democracy (published in Iran); the co-editor of Localizing Knowledge in a Globalizing World (Syracuse University Press, 2002); and the guest editor of “Beyond the Boundaries of the Old Geographies: Natives, Citizens, Exiles, and Cosmopolitans” in Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East, which was published in 2005. He is currently completing the book Al Ghazali’s Alchemy of Happiness.

From 2002 to 2015, he held several administrative posts in the Gallatin School Deans’ Office, most notably serving twice as the School’s interim dean. Professor Mirsepassi has taught at Hampshire College, Amherst College, Mount Holyoke College, Smith College, and the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. He is the recipient of several awards, including a 2001 Best Researcher of the Year Award, a teaching award from Tehran University, 2014 Award for Outstanding Service from the Institute for International Education Scholar Rescue Fund, and has received grants from the Ford Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities.