First European Round Table on Modern Persian Literature and official Mid-Term Conference of the Societas Iranologica Europaea 2024 (Univ. de Bamberg, Allemagne)
The Round Table is organised in cooperation with the laboratoire CERMOM (Centre de Recherches Moyen-Orient et Méditérranée) of the Institut National des Langues et Civilisations Orientales (INALCO, Paris), by Julie Duvigneau, Goulia Ghardashkhani and Christoph U. Werner.
Modern Persian literature in all major genres — prose, poetry, drama, criticism, etc. — has been written and read in Iran since the early twentieth century. Despite a vibrant production field, modern Persian literature remains widely understudied, due to a lack of institutional foundations both inside and outside of Iran. Inside Iran, modern literature has always been regarded as a potential subversive threat, both during the Pahlavi period for its supposed leftist and oppositional tendencies, and after the revolution as a challenge to Islamist ideologies. Outside of Iran, modern literature has rarely found its place inside Oriental Studies departments and has been in competition with classical Persian literature that lends itself better to diasporic identity building.
The first European Round Table on Modern Persian Literature aims to address this dual predicament in the study and reception of modern and contemporary Persian literature. Regarding institutional infrastructure, it intends to identify researchers and research locations in Europe (and beyond) and establish networks to facilitate publications, teaching, mobility, and joint projects. The European context allows easier personal contacts, but also an awareness of Persian literature in a multilingual setting and the need for multi-language translations (in French, English, German, Italian, Swedish, etc.). Concerning research focus and methodology, the goal is to bring into attention works, topics, and critical approaches that challenge and pluralize the present understanding of modern Persian/Iranian literary system and ultimately help to re-conceptualize its development within a trans-periodic and trans-cultural model.