"Art and Literary Exchange Between Iran, Transcaucasia, Central Asia, and Russia in the 20th Century"
 
The 2021-2022 Colloquium Series of the Iranian Studies Initiative
In collaboration with the UCSB Graduate Center for Literary Research
 

About

The 2021/2022 series of lectures and seminars will address transnational exchanges in roughly three periods: The Tsarist/Qajar Era, the Soviet Union/Pahlavi era, and the Islamic Republic/Post 1991 era, with a focus on Iran, Russia, Transcaucasia, and Central Asia. 

Schedule

October 30 - Katerina Clark (Yale University), "A Persian Poet in Stalin's Russia: Abolquasem Lahuti in Tajikstan" 

February 12 - Sam Hodgkin (Yale University), "Newspaper Poetry and Representative Politics in the Revolutions of 1905-1911” 
 
February 19 - Janet Afary (UC Santa Barbara), “Molla Nasreddin of Tiflis and the Diasporic Milieu that Gave Birth to It”
 
February 26 - Touraj Atabaki (Leiden University), “Theater of Enlightenment/Space of Modernity. Popular Stage in the Caspian Region 1890-1920" 
 
March 5 - Teoman Aktan (University of Istanbul), “The Role of Critical Literature in Reflecting the Socio-Political Issues of the Qajar and the Caucasus”
 
May 21 - Giorgi Papashvili (Tbilisi State Academy of Art), “Image of Iran in the Press of Tiflis from the late 19th century to World War I”
 
May 28 - Rebecca Gould (University of Birmingham), “Two Cosmopolitan Thinkers from the Caucasus: Abbas Quli Agha Bakikhanov and Mirza Fath-Ali-Akhundzadeh”
 

 

 

 

What Graduate Students Are Reading

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Iman Salty is reading Troubling Vision: Performance, Visuality, and Blackness by Nicole R. Fleetwood. 

Troubling Vision examines the constructed visual narratives of Black culture as it has been created and perpetuated by American media. Using critical race theory, media studies, feminist theory, and performance theory, this book exposes how the production and circulation of Black visualities have resulted in troubling conceptions of coded and performative methods for visualizing Black subjects in the public sphere.

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Surojit Kayal is reading The Marvelous Clouds by John Durham Peters.

In The Marvelous Clouds, the author argues that though we often think of media as environments, the reverse is just as true—environments are media. Drawing from ideas implicit in media philosophy, Peters argues that media are more than carriers of messages: they are the very infrastructures combining nature and culture that allow human life to thrive.  

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Mary Okin is reading Hollywood Flatlands: Animation, Critical Theory, and the Avant-Garde by Esther Leslie.

With ruminations on drawing, colour and caricature, on the political meaning of fairy-tales, talking animals and human beings as machines, the book brings to light the links between animation, avant-garde art and modernist criticism, and Leslie reveals how the animation of commodities can be studied as a journey into modernity in cinema. 

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Richard Nedjat-Haiem is reading Broadcasting Change: Arabic Media as a Catalyst for Liberalism by Joseph Baude.

Amid civil war, failing states, and terrorism, Arab liberals are growing in numbers and influence. Advocating a culture of equity, tolerance, good governance, and the rule of law, they work through some of the region’s largest media outlets to spread their ideals within the culture. This book analyzes this trend by portraying the intersection of media and politics in two Arab countries with seismic impact on the region and beyond. 

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James Nichols is reading Exorcismos de la memoria: Políticas y poéticas de la melancolía en la España de la transición by Alberto Medina Dominguez. 

Through an interdisciplinary approach in which the analysis of philosophical, filmic, literary and political texts coexist, the book deals with a reading hypothesis of the period in which the lines of demarcation between the aesthetic and the political are blurred.

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Wendy Sun is reading Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination by Toni Morrison.

Morrison shows how much the themes of freedom and individualism, manhood and innocence, depended on the existence of a black population that was manifestly unfree--and that came to serve white authors as embodiments of their own fears and desires. Her discussions of the "Africanist" presence in the fiction of various authors leads to a dramatic reappraisal of the essential characteristics of our literary tradition. 

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Ursula Friedman is reading The Red Brush: Writing Women of Imperial China, edited by Wilt L. Idema and Beata Grant.

Because of the burgeoning interest in the study of both premodern and modern women in China, this anthology offers a glimpse of women's writings not only in poetry but in other genres as well, including essays and letters, drama, religious writing, and narrative fiction.

Rachel Feldman is reading Suddenly in the Depths of the Forest (Hebrew: פתאום בעומק היער: אגדה‎) by Amos Oz. 

A dark, yet gen­tle, "fable for all ages" about silence, tolerance, and the role of language, orig­i­nal­ly pub­lished in Hebrew in 2005. The narrative is based in a mysterious town without animals or birds. Legend tells that they have been spirited away by the Pied Piper figure of Nehi, the mountain demon. Two children set out into the forest to find out more. 

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Christene d'Anca is reading Marie of France: Countess of Champagne, 1145-1198, by Theodore Evergates. 

Countess Marie of Champagne is primarily known today as the daughter of Louis VII of France and Eleanor of Aquitaine and as a literary patron of Chrétien de Troyes. In this engaging biography, Theodore Evergates offers a more rounded view of Marie as a successful ruler of one of the wealthiest and most vibrant principalities in medieval France.

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Welcome to the incoming cohorts for the 2021-2022 academic year, and congratulations to our new GCLR fellows Han Hao and Carissa Martin! The GCLR is (co-) run by students like you, and we welcome you to our vibrant scholarly community. Please join us online this Friday, Octover 22nd from 4-5 pm PST at the Annual GCLR Meet and Greet to welcome Han and Carissa and hear about their shared interests in ancient Greek literature. 
 
Professor Sven Spieker and Rachel Feldman 
 

 

Events

2021-2022 Colloquium Series of the Iranian Studies Initiative: Dr. Katerina Clark (Yale) “A Persian Poet in Stalin's Russia: Abolqasem Lahuti in Tajikistan”
Please join us in welcoming Dr. Katerina Clark, the B.E. Bensinger Professor of Comparative Literature and of Salvic Languages and Literatures at Yale University, for her talk entitled "A Persian Poet in Stalin's Russia: Abolquasem Lahuti in Tajikstan". Dr. Clark's talk will be the inagural lecture of "Art and Literary Exchange Between Iran, Transcaucasia, Central Asia, and Russia in the 20th Century", the 2021-2022 Colloquium Series of the Iranian Studies Initiative in collaboration with the UCSB Graduate Center for Literary Research. 
 
 
  1. October 30, 2021 - 10:00am
2021 Annual GCLR Meet and Greet

Students and faculty, please join us this Friday, October 22 from 4-5 pm PST for the GCLR’s 2021/22 yearly (online) Meet & Greet, a great opportunity to meet new students as well as GCLR Board members. We will be joined by our incoming GCLR Fellows, Carissa Martin and Han Hao, for an informal discussion about interdiciplinarity and their shared research interests in ancient Greek literature. Other highlights will include welcoming past participants Dustin Lovett and Wendy Sun who will speak about their application process and experience attending the Harvard Institute for World Literature, our upcoming plans for the annual Spring conference "Forked Tongues" and how to get involved, and hearing from our managing editor Rachel Feldman and two of our editorial leads, Christene D'anca and Margarita Delcheva, about the next steps for Exchanges, our forthcoming graduate student responsive journal. We look forward to seeing you Friday! 

  1. October 22, 2021 - 4:00pm
Cripping UCSB Distinguished Faculty Lecture - Dr. Tanya Titchkosky, "Humanity’s Edge: Encounters though Disability Studies”

Our third and final installment of our series on Disability Studies (DS), the "Cripping UCSB" Distinguished Faculty Lecture, will be delivered by Dr. Tanya Titchkosky, Professor in Social Justice Education at OISE at the the University of Toronto. Professor Titchkosky's talk is entitled "Humanity’s Edge: Encounters though Disability Studies” and will take place November 10, 4:00 pm - 5:00 pm PST on Zoom. 

  1. November 10, 2021 - 4:00pm
Memory Studies Graduate Research Working Group

We invite graduate students interested in exploring the cultural, cognitive, performative, representational, and technological facets of remembering and forgetting to join the Memory Studies Graduate Research Working Group (GRWG). A cross-disciplinary field, Memory Studies tackles the multifaceted relations between history and memory, past and present, testimony and witnessing, ethics and politics, and the role of visual, digital, and global media in enacting and performing memory work. If you are interested in joining, please write to Sven Spieker.  

GCLR Fellows 2021-2022

Congratulations to our 2021-2022 GCLR Fellows, Han Hao in Comparative Literature and Carissa Martin in Classics! The GCLR is pleased to support the interdisciplinary work of these two new doctoral students to UCSB. We look forward to their contributions and activity in our research center and community. 

CFP: Spring Workshop on Language Ideologies

We are now accepting proposals by graduate students for a Spring workshop exploring the theme of Language Ideologies. Looking to the interrelated fields of Translation Studies,  Sociolinguistics, and Cross-Cultural Studies, we welcome proposals that explore the ways that language ideologies are articulated in literature, art, and film. We also welcome proposals that focus on poetic translation, self-translation, linguistic adaptation or assimilation, and other translingual practices. Graduate students who are interested in co-curating a workshop on this topic should submit a short proposal of 250 words to Rachel Feldman at gclr@complit.ucsb.edu by or before November 15th. 

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