From Houri Moghadam to Homa Sarshar: Iranian Women Archives at Stanford Part 2

March 6, 2025A half-day conference celebrating important archival collections at Stanford University created by or about Iranian women. Scholars explored the intricacies of archival creation, the vital role these collections play in preserving the modern history of Iranian women, and the pressing need for continued archival research and scholarship in this area.Farzaneh Milani is Raymond J. Nelson Professor Emerita of Iranian literature and Gender Studies at the University of Virginia. She has published several articles and books, most recently, The Literary Biography of Forugh Farrokhzad and Unpublished Letters. Milani is currently working on a book project tentatively titled, “Iranian Women Writers at the Threshold of the Local and the Global.”Sepideh Mohammadian was born in 1986 in Tehran, Iran. She is an author, screenwriter and researcher. She earned her BA in Law and MA in sociology and is fluent in Farsi, English, French and Turkish. Mohammadian has been writing for 20 years now, working with Roshangaran Publication since the beginning of her career as a writer. She has worked with several literary magazines in Iran having published short stories and also is a member of Pen America. Mohammadian’s research works focus on semiotics in films and the difficulties social, racial and sexual minorities face in society. She has written eight books some of which are banned in Iran. Her latest book, The Assembly of the Forgotten, which was banned in Iran, was recently published by Mehri Publication in London. Since she has been advocating for the freedom to write, particularly for marginalized voices, she actively promotes and highlights banned books by fellow writers on her social media platforms, aiming to raise awareness of their work and the unjust censorship they face.Negar Mottahedeh is a Professor of Literature at Duke University. Her research on film, social media, and social movements in the Middle East has been published with Stanford University Press, Syracuse University Press, Duke University Press. This includes her monographs Whisper Tapes: Kate Millet in Iran which was published with Stanford UP in 2019, Displaced Allegories: Iranian Cinema 1980-2000 published with DUP in 2008 and #iranelection: hashtag solidarity and the transformation of online life. She has written for WIRED magazine, The Hill, Salon.com, The Observer and The Wall Street Journal. She holds a PhD in Comparative Studies in Discourse and Society from the University of Minnesota and a BA in International Relations from Mount Holyoke College. Nahid Pirnazar is a lecturer of Iranian Studies at UCLA where she received her Ph.D. in 2004 in Iranian Studies with an emphasis on Judeo-Persian literature and Iranian Jewish History. She has been teaching the Habib Levy Visiting Professorship of Judeo-Persian Literature at UCLA since 2000, and the History of Iranian Jews at UCLA since 2007. Pirnazar is the founder and president of The House of Judeo-Persian Manuscripts, an academic organization, which collects, preserves, transliterates and publishes Judeo-Persian manuscripts. She presents her research internationally, which focuses on varied aspects of Judeo-Persian writings and Iranian literature as well as the history, culture and national identity of Iranian Jews.Mona Tajali is a scholar of gender and politics, specializing in women's political participation and representation in Muslim countries, with a comparative focus on Iran, Afghanistan, and Turkey. Her research includes analysis of feminist mobilization against patriarchal structures as well as the experiences of institutionalization of women's rights in semi-democratic and non-democratic contexts. She is the author of Women’s Political Representation in Iran and Turkey: Demanding a Seat at the Table (2022) and co-author of Electoral Politics: Making Quotas Work for Women (2011), both published as open access. She is also the co-editor of Women and Constitutions in Muslim Contexts (2024), the first compilation analyzing several national constitutions of the Muslim world through a gender lens. A firm believer in engaging across the academic-practitioner divide, Tajali has been a long-term collaborator with transnational solidarity network and Women Living Under Muslim Laws (WLUML), and, since 2019, has served as a member of its executive board. She is published in both academic and popular outlets, among them the Middle East Journal, Politics & Gender, The Conversation, and The Washington Post. Tajali is a former associate professor of international relations and women’s, gender, and sexuality studies at Agnes Scott College in Atlanta.Sponsored by Stanford's Green Library and the Hamid and Christina Moghadam Program in Iranian Studies