Azar Nafisi

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Azar Nafisi speaking at the 2004 National Book Festival in Washington D.C.

Azar Nafisi, Ph.D. (Persian: آذر نفیسی) (born December 1955) is an Iranian professor and writer who currently resides in the United States.

Nafisi's bestselling book Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books has gained a great deal of public attention and been translated into 32 languages.

1 Biography
2 Works
3 References
4 External links
- 4.1 Critics

[edit] Biography

Nafisi is currently a Visiting Fellow and lecturer at the Foreign Policy Institute of Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) in Washington, DC.

She is the daughter of Ahmad Nafisi, a former mayor of Tehran, and Nezhat Nafisi, who was among the first women to be elected to the Iranian parliament. Nafisi is married to Bijan Naderi, and has two children, Negar and Dara.

Born in Iran, Nafisi was sent to school in Lancaster, England at the age of 13^[1]. She moved to the United States in the last year of her high school career. She received a Ph.D in English and American literature at the University of Oklahoma. Nafisi returned to Iran in 1979 where she was a professor of English literature for 18 years at the University of Tehran. 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. She was expelled from the University of Tehran for refusing to wear the mandatory Islamic veil in 1981, and did not resume teaching until 1987^[2].

Having witnessed the Iranian revolution and the subsequent rise to power of the Ayatollah Khomeini, Nafisi soon became restless with the many stringent rules imposed upon women by her country's new rulers. Because she had lived in the United States before the revolution in Iran, she appreciated the freedom that women in other countries took for granted, and which women in Iran had now lost.

In 1995, finding herself no longer able to teach English literature properly without attracting the scrutiny of the authorities, she quit teaching at the university, and instead invited seven of her best female students to secretly attend regular meetings at her house, every Thursday morning. They studied literary works considered controversial and even dangerous to read in post-revolutionary Iranian society such as Lolita, Madame Bovary and The Great Gatsby, as well as novels by Henry James and Jane Austen, attempting to understand and interpret them from a modern Iranian perspective.

Nafisi left Iran on June 24, 1997 and moved to the United States, where she wrote Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books, a book where she shares her experiences as a woman living and working under the regime of the Islamic Republic. In the book, she declares "I left Iran, but Iran did not leave me."

It has been claimed that Nafisi has close relations with neoconservatives.^[3]^[4] In the acknowledgements she makes in Reading Lolita in Tehran, she writes of historian Bernard Lewis as "one who opened the door". Lewis is the author of What Went Wrong, a book which has been criticized by Juan Cole for its sweeping generalisations about the Islamic world ^[5], although Cole praises Lewis as a "usually very good author" in the same essay. What Went Wrong is sometimes associated with neoconservatism. ^[6]

Some scholars such as Hamid Dabashi believe that Nafisi may in fact be playing advocate to the devil by demonizing the Iranian nation and in this way tacitly try to legitimize contingent military action against the nation.

[edit] Works

Eye of the Storm: Women in Post-Revolutionary Iran (1992)
Anti-Terra: A Critical Study of Vladimir Nabakov’s Novels (1994)
Muslim Women and Politics of Participation (1997)
"Tales of Subversion: Women Challenging Fundamentalism in the Islamic Republic of Iran" in Religious Fundamentalisms and the Human Rights of Women (1999)
Reading Lolita in Tehran (2003)