The University of Chicago has been teaching ancient Iran and Iranian languages since the archaeological expeditions of the Oriental Institute in the 1920s, and in 1966 we began regularly teaching Persian literature of the 10th through the 20th century, among the first universities in North America to do so. Many of the professors of Persian literature and Iranian studies currently teaching at institutions in this country and abroad were trained in NELC.
Persian Language and Literature aims at a solid grounding in Persian language and its literature, from the tenth to the twenty-first centuries. The second Middle Eastern language can be Arabic, Armenian, Turkic, or Hebrew. Possible major fields of study are: Persian Language, Classical Persian Literature, Modern Persian Literature and Cinema, Comparative Literature, Sufism.
