The Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations at the University of Chicago is proud to present:
The 1st Annual Heshmat Moayyad Lecture in Persian Studies
"SHE CAN'T BE KEPT LOCKED UP":
The Forgotten Women of Medieval Persian Poetry
a lecture by Dick Davis (Ohio State University, emeritus)
Thursday 25 October 2018
Reception at 6:00pm followed by the lecture at 7:00pm
Pick Hall Lounge
University of Chicago
5828 S. University Avenue
Chicago, IL 60637
Pre-twentieth century women poets are hardly mentioned at all in standard surveys of Persian poetry, and yet virtually every generation during this thousand years produced at least one significant female poet, and some generations have produced many more. This talk will discuss the presence (too often absence) of women poets in the medieval Persian literary canon, and look in more detail at the distinctive achievements of four of these poets.
Dick Davis is Professor Emeritus of Persian at Ohio State University and the leading translator and scholar of Persian literature today, as well as an award-winning poet of original verse, and Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. He has translated Ferdowsi's Shahnameh, Gorgani's Vis and Ramin, Attar`s Conference of the Birds, the ghazals of Hafez, several works of modern Persian prose fiction (including My Uncle Napoleon by Pezeshkzad), and the poetry of Fatemeh Shams. He has furthermore published numerous studies of Persian literature, including dozens of articles and the monograph Epic and Sedition (University of Arkansas Press) on the Shahnameh.
The annual Heshmat Moayyad Lecture is made possible by an endowment in memory of Prof. Moayyad who taught his love of Persian literature and the cultures of greater Iran to generations of students at the University of Chicago from 1966 to 2010.