Monday, July 13, 2009
7:30 pm
The Brecht Forum, 451 West Street (between Bank & Bethune Streets), New York

Please join us for a roundtable discussion with three leading Iranian analysts: Ervand Abrahamian, Hamid Dabashi, and Arang Keshavarzian.  The discussion will be moderated by Leili Kashani and be opened up to the public.  Come with your questions about what is going on, to together think through what forms ethical solidarity might take for those of us who are not in Iran.

Ervand Abrahamian is Distinguished Professor of History at Baruch College, CUNY.  His books include A History of Modern Iran (2008), Targeting Iran (2007, with David Barsamian, Noam Chomsky, and Nahid Mozaffari), Inventing the Axis of Evil (2004, with Bruce Cumings and Moshe Ma'oz), Tortured Confessions (1999), Khomeinism (1993), The Iranian Mojahedin (1989), and Iran between Two Revolutions (1982).  He is working on a book called The CIA Coup in Iran.

Hamid Dabashi is the Hagop Kevorkian Professor of Iranian Studies and Comparative Literature at Columbia University.  He has written eighteen books and edited four, including), Islamic Liberation Theology: Resisting the Empire (2008), Iran: A People Interrupted (2007), Masters and Masterpieces of Iranian Cinema (2007), and Dreams of a Nation: On Palestinian Cinema (2006).  He is a co-founder of Dreams of a Nation, a Palestinian film project dedicated to preserving and safeguarding Palestinian Cinema.

Arang Keshavarzian, who was in Iran during the 2009 presidential elections, is an Associate Professor in the Department of Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies at NYU.  He is on the editorial committee of the Middle East Research and Information Project, where he has published articles on current events in Iran.  His book and articles focus on modern Iranian political economy and social movements, and his current research examines free trade zones in the Persian Gulf to shed more light on imperialism and globalization.

Leili Kashani has a graduate degree in Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies from NYU where she studied twentieth-century Iranian social movements, and she is a senior editor at Arab Studies Journal.