Afrassiabi Distinguished Lecture Series

Books from Bombay: Tehran’s Print Marketplace and its Transnational Dimensions, 1900-1950

Afshin Marashi
Saturday, February 11, 2017
KANE 220 at 7:00 p.m.

As modern print technologies became increasingly commonplace inside Iran - first via the lithographic method and later via the introduction of typography - traditional patterns of the production, circulation, and commerce of books experienced large-scale transformations. Among the changes that reshaped Iran’s print culture during this period was the growth of a new class of Tehran-based print entrepreneurs with increasingly transnational and global connections.

This talk will explore the evolution of Tehran’s marketplace of books during the early decades of the twentieth century and trace the emergence of this new class of Iranian print-entrepreneurs, and detail the social and cultural implications of their growing ties to the Persian-language marketplace of books in the Indian subcontinent.

AFSHIN MARASHI is the Farzaneh Family Chair of Modern Iranian History at the University of Oklahoma, where he also serves as the Director of the OU Center for Iranian Studies. He is also a member of the council of the Association for Iranian Studies, and is an editorial board member of the International Journal of Middle East Studies. His publications include Nationalizing Iran: Culture, Power, and the State, 1870-1940 (University of Washington Press, 2008), and a co-edited volume, Rethinking Iranian Nationalism and Modernity (University of Texas, 2014). His research has also appeared in The Journal of Persianate Studies, Iranian Studies, the International Journal of Middle East Studies, and Iran-Nameh. He is currently completing a book-length project on the cultural and intellectual exchange between the Zoroastrian-Parsi community of India and modern Iran, titled Exile and the Kingdom: The Parsi Community of India and the Making of Modern Iranian Nationalism.