Dominic Parviz Brookshaw
Dominic Parviz Brookshaw
Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature and Persian Literature
Contact:
dominicb@stanford.edu
650-723-1251
Office Hours:
By AppointmentBIO:
My research on pre-modern Persian and Arabic literature explores the intersection between performance, patronage, and desire. I am currently examining the emergence and genesis of Persian wine poetry in the early Islamic period, its relationship to earlier and contemporaneous Arabic wine poetry, the connection of the genre in both literatures to both the heteroerotic and the homoerotic, and the interplay between the bacchic and the panegyric. In terms of nineteenth-century Persian literature, I focus on women poets and women patrons in the early Qajar period (circa 1797-1848), and the involvement of these women in the Literary Return movement (bazgasht-i adabi). My research on modern/ist twentieth-century Persian poetry is currently centred on Iranian poets and their dialogue with (and ultimate reconfiguration of) the classical Persian poetic canon. My other research interests include the literature of the Iranian diaspora, non-Muslim religious minorities in Qajar Iran, and Persian language learning.
Before arriving at Stanford, Dominic Parviz Brookshaw taught medieval and modern Persian literature and Persian language at the University of Manchester (2007-2011), McGill University (2005-2007), and the University of Oxford (2002-2005). Since 2004 he has served as Assistant Editor for Iranian Studies. He is a member of the Board of the International Society for Iranian Studies (ISIS), and a former member of the Governing Council of the British Institute of Persian Studies (BIPS).
CURRICULUM VITAE:
Download (right click and "save as")EDUCATION:
2008: DPhil, University of Oxford, Oriental Studies (medieval Persian poetry)
1998: BA Hons, University of Oxford, Oriental Studies (Arabic with Persian)
News & Events
Courses
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COMPLIT125Aut2012-13
Aims to make present and accessible, to our early 21st-century experience, convergences and differences between medieval Persian and medieval European love poetry. Poetry will be dealt with as a discursive and institutional means through which it is possible to make present and tangible that which is absent -- both in space and time. If we accept that medieval Persian and European love poetry conjured up moods of homo- and heteroerotic desire for contemporary audiences, then this desire can also become present for us today through a close reading of those same texts.
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COMPLIT241BSpr2012-13
Through a close reading of pre-modern Persian poetic and prose texts, there will be an examination of the centrality of wine imagery in both profane and mystical Persian literature. Students will be exposed to a wide range of texts dating from 900-1400 CE. Intermediate command of Persian is required.
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COMPLIT121Aut2012-13
An exploration of the origins, evolution, and migration of one of the world's great poetic genres, the ghazal (short lyric poem, usually on love). Starting with a discussion of the origins of the genre in the late pre-Islamic and early Islamic periods in Arabic and Persian, then moving to an examination of the evolution of the genre in the early medieval Islamic period in those languages, and the subsequent emergence of the ghazal in the related literatures of Hebrew, Ottoman Turkish, and Urdu. Consideration of European translations of ghazals in the 18th and 19th centuries, the effect of these translations on contemporary European poetry, and the migration of the genre into English in the 19th and 20th centuries.