Virtual: Panel III – Religio-Political Dimensions of Desire in Modern Iran

This webinar is part of the series, “Revisiting Discourses of Love, Sex, and Desire in Modern Iran and Diaspora: A Symposium in a Series of Panels.”

Register in advance: go.unc.edu/Iran

From their mundane to their sublime forms, love and desire have played a central role in various discourses in modern Iran. From romantic epics to ghazals, and from arranged marriages to white marriages, and from companionate love to contemporary cohabitations, desire is undoubtedly one of the most important theoretical topics for scholars. This symposium brings together a range of scholars from different disciplines focusing on modern Iran to analyze the wide variety of ways in which love and desire have been represented, imagined, and discursively constructed.

– “Girls for Sale: The Politics of Child Marriage in Iran”

Maryam Zehtabi Sabeti Moqaddam, University of Massachusetts–Amherst

– “The Politics of Love in Iran: Implications of “Religious Hypocrisy of Clerics” in the Form of Temporary Marriages”

Nasim Basiri, doctoral student in Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies, Oregon State University

– “The Supreme Leader and I: Erotic Desire in Iranian Female Poets Reading their Poems for the Supreme Leader of Iran”

Mahdi Tourage, associate professor of Religious Studies and Social Justice and Peace Studies, King’s University College, London, Ontario

– Panel Chair and Discussant, Didem Havlioglu, Duke and UNC-Chapel Hill

Register in advance: go.unc.edu/Iran

For more information, please contact Claudia Yaghoobi, Roshan Institute associate professor in Persian Studies at UNC-Chapel Hill, yaghoobi@email.unc.edu

Co-Sponsors: The American Institute of Iranian Studies, UNC Persian Studies Program, Duke-UNC Consortium for Middle East Studies, Center for Middle East and Islamic Studies, Department of Asian Studies, Associate Dean of Arts and Sciences, Associate Dean of Global Affairs, Department of English and Comparative Literature, Department of History, Department of Religious Studies, Department of Women and Gender Studies, Department of Geography, Institute for the Arts and Humanities, Iranian Cultural Society of North Carolina, The Library Collections’ Horner-Jarrahi Speaker Series, Countering Hate Initiative