Forum on the Humanities and the Public World

Azar Nafisi, author
“The Republic of the Imagination”

Wednesday, December 5, 2007
8pm  |  Zellerbach Auditorium
Presented in association with Cal Performances. Tickets may be purchased online at calperfs.berkeley.edu

Azar Nafisi is best known as the author of Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books, an inspired blend of reminiscences and literary criticism that electrified readers with a compassionate and often harrowing portrait of the Islamic Revolution in Iran and how it affected one university professor and her students. Earning high acclaim and multiple literary prizes, the book is “an eloquent brief on the transformative powers of fiction — on the refuge from ideology that art can offer to those living under tyranny, and art’s affirmative and subversive faith in the voice of the individual” (The New York Times). At this special appearance, Nafisi will explore her belief in (and advocacy of) the Republic of the Imagination, “a country worth building, a state with a future, a place where we can truly know freedom.”

Nafisi is visiting professor and director of the SAIS Dialogue Project at the Foreign Policy Institute of Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies in Washington, D.C. She has held a fellowship at Oxford University, teaching and conducting a series of lectures on culture and the important role of Western literature and culture in Iran after the revolution in 1979. She has taught at the University of Tehran, the Free Islamic University, and Allameh Tabatabai, earning national respect and international recognition for advocating on behalf of Iran’s intellectuals, youth and especially young women. She was expelled from the University of Tehran for refusing to wear the mandatory Islamic veil in 1981, and did not resume teaching until 1987.

She has lectured and written extensively in English and Persian on the political implications of literature and culture, as well as the human rights of the Iranian women and girls and the important role they play in the process of change for pluralism and an open society in Iran. She has been consulted on issues related to Iran and human rights both by policy makers and various human rights organizations in the U.S. and elsewhere. She is also involved in the promotion of not just literacy, but of reading books with universal literary value.

Nafisi has written for The New York Times, the Washington Post, and The Wall Street Journal. She is the author of Anti-Terra: A Critical Study of Vladimir Nabokov’s Novels. She also wrote the new introduction to the Modern Library Classics edition of Tolstoy’s Hadji Murad, as well as the introduction to Iraj Pezeshkzad’s My Uncle Napoleon. She has published a children’s book, BiBi and the Green Voice.

Reading Lolita in Tehran has been translated into 32 languages, and has won diverse literary awards, including the 2004 Non-fiction Book of the Year Award from Booksense; the Frederic W. Ness Book Award; the 2004 Latifeh Yarsheter Book Award; an achievement award from the American Immigration Law Foundation; and the Persian Golden Lioness Award for literature, presented by the World Academy of Arts, Literature, and Media.

Links

Strictly Speaking series at Cal Performances.
Wikipedia entry.
The Dialogue Project at Johns Hopkins University.
Interview from NOW on PBS.