Azar Nafisi, scholar and best selling author of Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books, will speak at the New Hampshire Institute of Politics at Saint Anselm College Wednesday, Sept. 10, at 7 p.m.
Her lecture, “The Republic of the Imagination”, will be based on an essay she wrote for the Washingt
on Post about how literature transcends political barriers. The event is free and open to the public.
Azar Nafisi is the director of the Dialogue Project at the Foreign Policy Institute of Johns Hopkins University's School of Advanced International Studies in Washington, DC, where she is a professor of aesthetics, culture, and literature. She teaches courses on the relation between culture and politics. She 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.
In Iran, she taught at the University of Tehran, the Free Islamic University, and Allameh Tabatabai before her return to the United States in 1997. During that time, she won national respect and international recognition for advocating on behalf of Iran's intellectuals, youth, and especially young women. In 1981, she was expelled from the University of Tehran for refusing to wear the mandatory Islamic veil and did not resume teaching until 1987.
Reading Lolita in Tehran, which spent more than 117 weeks on The New York Times bestseller list, offers readers a compelling, compassionate and often harrowing portrait of the Islamic revolution in Iran and how it affected one university professor and her students. Earning acclaim and an enthusiastic readership, the book is an incisive exploration of the transformative powers of fiction in a world of tyranny. Reading Lolita in Tehran has been translated in 32 languages, and has won many literary awards.
Funding for this event generously provided by a gift from BAE Systems of Nashua. Additional support provided by the Norwin S. and Elizabeth N. Bean Foundation, and the Distinguished Scholar Series at the NHIOP.