Azar Nafisi, Author of "Reading Lolita in Tehran," to speak at the Forum Book Club

The Connecticut Forum Announces:

Azar Nafisi, Author of Reading Lolita in Tehran
will be a Panelist at
Forum Book Club
Saturday, May 7, 2011

Azar Nafisi is best known as the author of the national bestseller Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books, which electrified its readers with a compassionate and often harrowing portrait of the Islamic revolution in Iran and how it affected one university professor and her students. Earning high acclaim and an enthusiastic readership, Reading Lolita in Tehran is an incisive exploration of the transformative powers of fiction in a world of tyranny. The book has spent over 117 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list.

Nafisi is a Visiting Professor and the Executive Director of Cultural Conversations 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, and teaches courses on the relation between culture and politics. Nafisi 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. She taught at the University of Tehran, the Free Islamic University, and Allameh Tabatabai before her return to the United States in 1997 - earning 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.

Nafisi also conducted workshops in Iran for women students on the relationship between culture and human rights; the material culled from these workshops formed the basis of a new human rights education curriculum. She has lectured and written extensively in English and Persian on the political implications of literature and culture, as well as the human rights of the Iranian women and girls and the important role they play in the process of change for pluralism and an open society in Iran. She has been consulted on issues related to Iran and human rights both by the policy makers and various human rights organizations in the US and elsewhere. She is also involved in the promotion of not just literacy, but of reading books with universal literary value.

Azar Nafisi has written for The New York Times, Washington Post, and The Wall Street Journal. Her cover story, “The Veiled Threat: The Iranian Revolution’s Woman Problem” published in The New Republic (February 22, 1999) has been reprinted into several languages. Additionally, she has published a children’s book (with illustrator Sophie Benini Pietromarchi) BiBi and the Green Voice. Azar Nafisi’s most recent book, Things I Have Been Silent About: Memories, a memoir about her mother, was published in January 2009. She is currently working on a book entitled Republic of the Imagination, which is about the power of literature to liberate minds and peoples.

For more information, see Nafisi's website .

See Nafisi speaking about her home country of Iran

Twitter and Iran

I've been using Twitter for a few months now, but I'm still undecided when people ask me if I like it. It can be as self-indulgent and narcissistic as the haters claim, but it can also be really useful. I follow mostly people / organizations that tell me something about what's going on with things that I care about, and I've found it mostly to be a helpful, self-selected news feed, catered just to me.

And now, with the way it's being used to keep the world informed of the news from Iran, I understand what Twitter might be at its best. Iranians and others have been using Twitter to communicate, not only with family and friends, but with those who are grasping for news and trying to sort out what's happening in real time; Twitter even postponed a scheduled update so as not to interrupt what has become a crucial service for getting news out of Iran when many have found themselves without phones or reliable Internet access.

In a recent TED Blog interview, NYU Professor Clay Shirky spoke about the influence of the internet on the way we digest and understand world news as it unfolds, and he was asked about the recent events in Iran in particular. When asked: "Which services have caused the greatest impact? Blogs? Facebook? Twitter?", Shirky replied:

"It's Twitter. One thing that Evan (Williams) and Biz (Stone) did absolutely right is that they made Twitter so simple and so open that it's easier to integrate and harder to control than any other tool. At the time, I'm sure it wasn't conceived as anything other than a smart engineering choice. But it's had global consequences. Twitter is shareable and open and participatory in a way that Facebook's model prevents. So far, despite a massive effort, the authorities have found no way to shut it down, and now there are literally thousands of people around the world who've made it their business to help keep it open."

You can read the entire interview on the Ted Blog.

Also check out Andrew Sullivan's amazing blog coverage of the news out of Iran - Sullivan regularly collects Tweets out of Iran (like this), giving a real feel for what people in Iran are thinking, seeing and feeling. It's a new way of collecting news and understanding events in real time, outside of traditional news sources.

Insights into Iranian Imbroglio

As your high school history teacher - and even college professor(s) if you majored in the subject like me - likely told you many times: In order to make sense of the present we must first look to the past. In that same vein, I thought I'd poke around at past Forum footage to see if any of our panelists had said anything relating to the current election fiasco in Iran. In fact, one had, Benazir Bhutto, take it away:



Although the late former Pakistani Prime Minister was not talking about Iran specifically, she very presciently touched on many of the hot-button issues that Obama administration officials are looking at squarely (U.S. interventionism, terrorism, nuclear capabilities, global security).

To what extent should Obama intervene, if at all? Is the United States willing to impose sanctions on Iran for election fraud? Would we look hypocritical if we did? Is the International Community willing to stand behind us? Does it really matter if one puppet president is replaced by another one? There are no simple answers to these questions, although Slate offers some advice and tries to get in Obama's head. Nevertheless, nobody can deny that what's currently going on in Iran seems like the hopeful beginnings of (dare I say it?) change, but as to what's really going on, and what will come of it, that's anybody's guess.

I will say, however, that it's nice to have a president who is on top of this, rather than one who jokingly sang "bomb bomb bomb Iran" at a campaign rally in South Carolina a couple of years ago.


By Abe Silk