Keynote Address to "Writing the Iranian Revolution: Memory, Testimony, Time"

Conventional views narrate the Iranian Revolution as the result of the struggle organized by secularist and Islamist groups against the Shah. This binary understanding of the revolutionary forces has given rise to a dominant interpretation that the revolution was hijacked in its final months by the clergy and turned into an Islamic revolution. In this talk, Prof. Ghamari will discuss how such bifurcated narratives fail to capture the spirit that gave rise to the revolutionary movement, a spirit that had roots in cultural, literary, historical, and political singularities of the period.

This event is FREE and OPEN to the PUBLIC.

Behrooz Ghamari-Tabrizi is Professor of History and Sociology at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. He is a Conrad Humanities Fellow and the author of Foucault in Iran: Islamic Revolution after the Enlightenment (Minneapolis & London: University of Minnesota Press, 2016), Remembering Akbar: Inside the Iranian Revolution (New York-London-San Francisco: OR / Counterpoint Press, 2016), and Islam and Dissent in Postrevolutionary Iran (New York-London: I.B. Tauris, 2008).