Shahla Shafiq is a researcher and author. Her publications are on inter-cultural issues, racism, political Islam and immigrants in France. Her doctoral dissertation in sociology is on political Islam, Sex, Gender and Society. Ms. Shafiq has written number of books and articles in both Farsi and French. She is one of the founders of “International Network of Solidarity with Iranian Women”.
Maziar Behrooz is the author of “Rebels with a Cause: The Failure of the Left in Iran” and numerous articles in Persian and English about Iranian politics. He has appeared as a guest on radio programs including the Persian broadcasting of BBC and Radio SBS (Australia-Persian).
Daryoush Ashouri has served as a visiting professor and lecturer of Persian language and literature at Tokyo University of Foreign Studies, Oxford University, and of political philosophy and political sociology at the University of Tehran.
He is the author of ”An Introduction to Sociology”, “Modernity and Us”, “Dictionary of Philosophy and Political Science”, “Political Encyclopedia” among others. He is also a translator of works by Nietzsche, William Shakespeare and Nicola Machiavelli.
MANSOUR FARHANG has a Ph.D. in political science from Claremont Graduate School. In 1970s, he taught at California State University at Sacramento. Following Iran’s 1979 revolution, he served as an advisor to the Iranian foreign ministry and as ambassador to the United Nations. He resigned his ambassadorship in protest when his efforts to negotiate the release of the American hostages in Tehran failed. In the early months of the Iran-Iraq war, he worked with international mediators to settle the war. During this period, he wrote and spoke about the threat of religious extremists who had come to dominate the course of the Iranian revolution. In June 1981, following the violent suppression of political dissidents, he was forced to leave Iran. In the fall of 1981, he returned to the United States and became a research fellow and lecturer at Princeton University. Since 1983 he has been teaching international relations and Middle Eastern politics at Bennington College in Vermont. He is the author of two books and dozens of articles, in English and Persian, published in both academic journals and popular periodicals. His opinion pieces have appeared in a variety of newspapers, including the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, the Washington Post, and the Christian Science Monitor. His third book, A Theology in Power: Reflections on the Iranian Revolution is near completion. He has been a human rights activist since his undergraduate days in California. Currently, he serves on the advisory board of Human Rights Watch/Middle East and is a designated speaker for the Vermont Council on the Humanities. He has lectured at many universities and colleges across the country and is a member of the Columbia University Middle Eastern Seminar. He has also been a participant in the seminars of Council on Foreign Relations and Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. He has appeared as a guest on numerous radio and television programs, including PBS News Hour, ABC’s Night Line, Bill Moyer’s Journal, 60-Minutes, CBS’s Face the Nation and CNN. He is a regular commentator on the Persian broadcasting of both BBC and Radio France International.
According to Dr. Ferdowsi: “A son blinds his father, lets him die in exile, and elopes with his father’s wife. Around the same time, he dismembers his tutor and regent, and scatters his body parts all over his domain. Murder, blinding, incest—these are the classic ingredients of every oedipal story. The central figure in this saga is Shah Shoja (d.786/1384), the mid-14th century Mozaffarid ruler of Shiraz and adjacent areas. The scandal threw his reign into a downward spiral that temporarily cost him his throne. His courtiers went to work to alter the valence of the scandal by overwriting it with an edifying counter-narrative: the famous Biblical/ Koranic story of Joseph, itself long recognized as a variant of the oedipal theme. Hafez was one of these courtiers. Like other Persian courtly authors, he too invested his incredible skills in the magical alchemy of a labor of mystification to conjure up a discourse of legitimacy out of the existing and widely shared capital of the Perso-Islamic tradition.”
An evening with Behrouz Vossoughi, Prominent Iranian Actor, On the occasion of his newly published biography, Dec 18, 2005
Reese Erlich traveled to Iran in June 2005 to report on the Iranian presidential elections for NPR and the Dallas Morning News. He had the opportunity to interview many ordinary Iranians, attend women’s rights demonstration and meet with high ranking officials. He will describe the political mood in Iran and assess the latest threats from the Bush Administration. Erlich made the trip with Norman Solomon and Sean Penn, and Erlich’s photos accompanied Penn’s articles in the SF Chronicle.
Dr. Freshteh Davaran has a Ph.D. in Near Eastern Studies. She has taught Persian Language and Near Eastern Studies at UC Berkeley, De Anza College and Diablo Valley College. She has translated “Daisy Miller” and “The Europeans” by Henry James and “Herzog” by Saul Bellow and is the author of numerous articles in Persian and English. Dr. Davaran’s presentation will be based on her thesis “Continuity in Iranian Identity: A Study of Andarz and Adab”.
Hamid Shokat is the author of Background on the Transition to the One-Party System in Soviet Russia; History of the Confederation of Iranian Students in two volumes; The Lost Years – From the October Revolution to Lenin’s Death; and three volumes of a series of books of An Inside Look into the Iranian Left Movement – Conversation with Khanbaba Tehrani; Iraj Kashkuli; and Koroush Lashaii. His new book is a continuous of these conversations.
….Lotfi is one of the greatest contemporary masters of the tar and setar. He is among the major figures who, in the past twenty years, have revolutionized the Persian traditional (classical) music. His innovative approach of combining the classical with folk elements, both in terms of music and technique, has injected a new vitality into a very old tradition. His original creativity and the deep-rooted emotional quality of his playing have made him the father of a new aesthetics in Persian music.
Mohammad Reza Lotfi died on May 2, 2014 in Tehran, Iran.
Aramesh Dustdar, born 1931 in Iran, philosopher, author and one of the most influential thinkers in the history of modern Iran.
After receiving his doctorate in philosophy from the University of Bonn, he returned to Iran and founded the philosophical school at the Univer- sity of Tehran. A member of the atheist faculty, already known for his antireligious views, Dust- dar became the target of radical Islamic activists when the 1979 Islamic revolution swept through Iran. Like so many other university professors, he left home to live in exile in Germany.
His first manuscript »Some Philosophical Remarks on Religion and Science« was lost in the turmoil of the revolution. For the incessant thinker, this was the basic building block for the launch of his three large volumes.
The first of these banned titles in Iran, »The Impossibility of Thinking in a Religious Culture«, has been fiercely debated among Iranian intel- lectuals for two decades. Today Dustdar lives in Cologne, Germany. His latest book »An Intro- duction to Pseudolanguage and Pseudoculture« was published by Forough Book in 2018.
Kourosh Taghavi teaches Iranian classical music. For the past eight years, he has toured the country on
performances with Barbad, Goosheh ensembles and currently with Hossein Omumi.
Hossein Lajevardi is the president of Association des Chercheurs Iraniens (ACI). Here is a summary of his professional activities.
Research Project Manager – Iranian Research and Advice Centre
· PhD in Sociology (Demography) from The Sorbonne, Paris – 1978
· Statistics and Demography Specialist – the Centre of Statistics of Iran – 1967-1980
· Senior Researcher – the Social Research and Study Institute, Tehran University – 1970 -1972
· Executive Project Manager, Population Growth in Iran on behalf of United Nations Development and Population (UNDP) -1973 – 1976
· Senior lecturer on Research Methodology, Tehran University and other Universities – 1978 – 1982
· Various Research Projects with French Universities and UN 1982 – 1992
Dr. Mehrdad Darvishpour, born and raised in Tehran, came to Sweden as a political refugee 20 years ago. He has a Ph.D. in Sociology. He is working at Stockholm University as a senior lecture and researcher. His dissertation was on immigrant women breaking the traditional family patterns. He is a well-known debater, active in the women’s movement, anti-racist and anti-war movement. He has published many articles on these subjects and appeared on numerous TV and radio shows as an advocate of these issues. He has published a number of articles in Persian, Swedish and English on Islamic revolution, modernity and democracy.
Javad Tabatabai Is born in Tabriz in 1945. He is Professor Emeritus and Vice Dean of the Faculty of Law and Political Science at the University of Tehran. After pursuing studies in theology, law and philosophy, he earned his PhD (Doctorat d’État) in political philosophy from the University of Paris 1 Panthéon Sorbonne, with a dissertation on Hegel’s political philosophy. He has been a guest fellow at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin, as well as at the Moynihan Institute of Global Affairs at Syracuse University. Dr Tabatabai has published a dozen books on the history of political ideas in Europe and Iran. On 14 July 1995, he was decorated as a Knight of the Ordre des Palmes Académiques.