Professor Nasrin Rahimieh is the Director of the Dr. Samuel M. Jordan Center for Persian Studies and Culture at the University of California-Irvine. She joined UCI from Canada’s McMaster University where she was the humanities dean. Best known for her research on intercultural encounters between Iran and the West, Rahimieh is a global leader in Persian studies and recently was elected president of the International Society for Iranian Studies, a community of more than 500 scholars. Rahimieh’s research has explored historic, literary, cinematic and artistic aspects of Iranian culture, with a particular focus on cultural encounters between Iran and the West and the issue of exile. Her 2001 book, Missing Persians: Discovering Voices in Iranian Cultural Heritage, explores the issue of cultural identity through the narratives of displaced Persians from the 16th century through modern times.Her publications include Oriental Responses to the West: Comparative Essays on Muslim Writers from the Middle East (Brill, 1990) and Missing Persians: Discovering Voices in Iranian Cultural Heritage (Syracuse University Press, 2001). Her reviews and articles have appeared in Iranian Studies, Comparative Literature Studies, Iran Nameh, The Middle East Journal, The Comparatist, Thamyris, Edebiyat, International Journal of Middle East Studies, Canadian Literature, New Comparison.

Conjuring Iran/Characterizing Iranianness

Abstract
Over the course of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries Iranian identity has been the subject of much soul searching, speculation, and revision. My presentation will focus on the different iterations of Iranian identity and self-characterizations of Iranians from the beginnings of the twentieth century to the present. Drawing on textual and visual material such as essays, short stories, poems, travelogues, novels, and films I will analyze how Iran and Iranian identity have been characterized over the course of this period. While the European Other has been central to the formation and repeated conceptualizations of Iranianness (iraniyyat), at certain junctures Iran’s own ethnic, religious, and linguistic diversities have provided the foil and/or the impetus for configurations of modern Iranian identity.