Events

Part of the Contemporary Iran: Realities and Prospects for the Future Series

Dr. Farzan Sabet is a Researcher in the Middle East WMD-Free Zone Project at the United Nations Institute for Disarmament Research (UNIDIR) and a Research Associate of the Global Governance Centre at the Geneva Graduate Institute. His research focuses on Middle East politics, nuclear arms control, disarmament, and non-proliferation, and economic sanctions.

He was previously a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Global Governance Centre of the Graduate Institute Geneva, a Nuclear Security Predoctoral Fellow at the Centre for International Security and Cooperation at Stanford University, and a Visiting Fellow in the Department of Government at Georgetown University. Sabet holds a Ph.D and M.A. in International History and Politics from the Geneva Graduate Institute and a B.A. in History and Political Science from McGill University. Sabet speaks English, French, and Persian.

Dr. John Myhill is professor of linguistics at the University of Haifa. His research focuses on semantics, discourse analysis, the relationship between language and identity, and the development of Nilo-Saharan languages as written languages. His books include Typological Discourse Analysis (Basil Blackwell), Language in Jewish Society: Towards a New Understanding (Multilingual Matters), and Language, Religion, and National Identity in Europe and the Middle East: A Historical Study (John Benjamins).

Sponsored by the Department of Eastern, Slavic, and German Studies and the Islamic Civilization & Societies Program at Boston College. Co-sponsored by the Center for Christian-Jewish Learning at Boston College.

Part of the Contemporary Iran: Realities and Prospects for the Future Series 

The New York Times calls him the “ambassador for a silenced music.” Honored as a peacemaker and virtuoso, Amir Vahab is a composer / vocalist and lecturer specializing in a wide variety of traditional Persian instruments: tanbour, saz, oud, ney, daf and zarb. Amir is noted for his expertise in Persian culture and history, and for the spirituality present in his music and teachings. Amir has been described as “one of the world’s most revered players and composers of Persian folk music.” Amir is the leader and principal player for the Amir Vahab Ensemble. 

Part of the Contemporary Iran: Realities and Prospects for the Future Series

Dr. Kaveh Madani is an environmental scientist, educator, and activist known for his work on complex human-natural systems at the interface of science, policy, and society. He is currently the Director of the United Nations University Institute of Water, Environment and Health (UNU-INWEH), known as the UN Think Tank on Water, where he leads scientific research and policy solutions to address the growing global water and environmental crises.

Dr. Madani is a former Deputy Vice President of Iran who served as the Deputy Head of Iran’s Department of Environment. He has also served as the Vice President of the UN Environment Assembly Bureau and Chief of Iran’s Department of Environment’s International Affairs and Conventions Center. He held different strategic roles during his public service and led Iran’s delegation in different major intergovernmental meetings and negotiations.

As a prolific scholar, Madani has worked extensively on complex issues in water management, environmental and energy policy, food security, climate change impacts and adaptation, sustainable development, and transboundary-conflicts and negotiations in North America, Europe, Africa, Asia and Middle East. He has received several prestigious awards and recognitions for his fundamental research contributions, teaching innovations, as well as outreach and humanitarian activities. Among these are the 2012 recognition by the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) as one of the ten New Faces of Civil Engineering, Arne Richter Award for Outstanding Young Scientists by the European Geosciences Union (EGU) in 2016, and the ASCE’s Walter Huber Civil Engineering Research Prize in 2017.

He holds a Ph.D. in Civil and Environmental Engineering from the University of California, Davis, Master of Water Resources from the Lund University and B.Sc. in Civil Engineering from the University of Tabriz, and has done his post-doctoral research in Environmental Economics and Policy at the Water Science and Policy Center at the University of California, Riverside.

For more information, please visit the series website.

Roya Hakakian is an Iranian-American writer, journalist, and public speaker. Her opinion columns, essays, and book reviews appear in leading English language publications including The New York Times, The New York Review of Books and The Atlantic. A founding member of the Iran Human Rights Documentation Center, she has spoken on a variety of news outlets, from CNN’s Fareed Zakaria GPS to MSNBC, as well as in Washington D.C. for the Senate Foreign Affairs Committee and the State Department with U.S. Secretary Antony Blinken. Her latest book A Beginner’s Guide to America: For the Immigrant and the Curious has been called a contemporary Tocquevlllian account by The Wall Street Journal and The Boston Globe. She is a recipient of the Guggenheim Fellowship among many other prizes and has been called one of “the most important activists, academics and journalists of her generation.”

Cosponsored by the Boston College International Studies Program, Islamic Civilization and Societies Program, and with the support of an ILA Major Grant.

All events are free and open to the public. Please RSVP here to reserve seating.

Tehran, July 2007: Reyhaneh Jabbari, 19, has a business meeting with a new client. When he tries to rape her, she stabs him in self-defense. Later that day, she is arrested for murder. Her trial results in a death penalty sentence. Thanks to personal and secretly recorded videos provided by Reyhaneh’s family, their testimonies and the letters written by Reyhaneh in prison, the film retraces the fate of a woman who becomes a symbol of resistance and women’s rights even beyond the borders of Iran. 

— Taken from Press notes - SEVEN WINTERS IN TEHRAN - Berlinale 2023 - ENG

Followed by Q&A with Natana J. DeLong-Bas, Theology Department and Islamic Civilization & Societies Program, and Kristin Peterson, Communication Department.

Free and open to public.

Refreshments will be served!

Dr. Walaa Quisay is Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at The School of Divinity, University of Edinburgh. She holds a D.Phil from the University of Oxford and has previously worked at the University of Manchester, the University of Birmingham, and Istanbul Şehir University. Her first monograph is entitled Neo-traditionalism in Islam in the West: Orthodoxy, Spirituality and Politics (Edinburgh University Press, 2023).

Exploring tensions between traditional orientations and modern subjectivities, the pursuit of enchantment and existing in a disenchanted, secular world, Neo-traditionalism in Islam in the West examines neo-traditionalism, its public pedagogues and their students (seekers of sacred knowledge) in the Euro-American context. These pedagogues, many of whom are white converts to Islam – such as Hamza Yusuf, Abdal Hakim Murad, and Umar Faruq Abd-Allah, organize and disseminate their traditional knowledge in spiritual retreats often held in secluded locations in the ‘East’.  Many of the seekers embarking on the retreat are motivated to forge a spiritual connection and self-actualization in the sacredness of this re-enchanted space. Isolated from the modern world and imbued with traditional Muslim symbolisms, the retreats provide desirable orientations to the sacred world in Islam and a rejection of the modern world around them. That is, the retreat provides both ‘ways of seeing’ as well as ‘what is to be seen’ as part of Islam within modernity. The central thrust of the sites of the transaction of sacred knowledge is to ‘school’ the learners into different narratives of spiritual decline under modern conditions. This talk will examine the formation of political subjectivities in what is ostensibly an anti-modern space.

This event is part of the Institute for the Liberal Arts, Contemporary Iran: Realities and Prospects for the Future

Dr. Mehdi Aloosh is a public health and preventive medicine specialist, family physician, and epidemiologist with over two decades of clinical and academic experience in Canada and Iran. Currently serving as the senior public health official in Windsor and Essex County, Ontario, Canada, Dr. Aloosh oversees the health and well-being of approximately half a million residents. Furthermore, he is an Assistant Professor within the Department of Health Research Methods, Evidence, and Impact at McMaster University, Hamilton, Canada.

Aloosh has numerous publications on population health issues in Iran. His research encompasses the impact of population policies on health outcomes, shedding light on crucial intersections between politics, policy, and public health. Furthermore, he has extensively studied the effects of economic sanctions on health determinants, population health, and transmission of infectious diseases.

Dr. Aloosh obtained his medical degree from Tehran University Medical Sciences, followed by specialty training in public health and preventive medicine and family medicine, MSc in epidemiology, and MSc in medical education at McMaster University and McGill University.

Cosponsored by the Islamic Civilization and Societies Program, the Schiller Institute for Integrated Science and Society, and the Program for Global Public Health and the Common Good