In this virtual book launch, Fatemeh Shams, assistant professor of modern Persian literature at the University of Pennsylvania will discuss her recently published book, A Revolution in Rhyme: Poetic Co-option Under the Islamic Republic (Oxford University Press, 2021), in conversation with Blake Atwood, Associate Professor of Media Studies and the Chair of Sociology, Anthropology, and Media Studies at the American University of Beirut and Domenico Ingenito, assistant professor of Persian literature at UCLA.
Fatemeh Shams is assistant professor of modern Persian literature at University of Pennsylvania. She has widely published on literature, politics and ideology in modern Iran. Her research interests include literary production under authoritarian states, patronage and poetic individuality, and politics of literary historiography. She is also an award-winning poet with three poetry collections. She is currently working on a manuscript about prison and exile literature in modern Iran. During the next academic year, Fatemeh will reside in Berlin as a Humboldt-EUME fellow.
Blake Atwood is an associate professor of media studies and the chair of the Department of Sociology, Anthropology, and Media Studies at the American University of Beirut (AUB). His research focuses on the intersection of technology, culture, and politics in contemporary Iran. He is the author of Underground: The Secret Life of Videocassettes in Iran (forthcoming with the MIT Press) and Reform Cinema in Iran: Film and Political Change in the Islamic Republic (Columbia University Press, 2016). Prior joining AUB, he taught at the University of Pennsylvania and the University of Texas at Austin.
Domenico Ingenito is Director of the Program on Central Asia and Assistant Professor of Classical Persian at UCLA. His research interests center on premodern Persian poetry (in particular the history of lyric genres at the intersection of eroticisms and politics) anthropology of ritual and symbolic representations (concepts of kingship, mourning rituals, poetry as a ritualized cultural performance), comparative literature (including Italian, Portuguese, Spanish, and Catalan), translations studies, and geocriticism.
Sponsor(s): Center for Near Eastern Studies