Abstract: Educational exchange plays a growing role in globalization and can be a potent force underlying conflict resolution. More American college students than ever before spend semesters overseas and look to countries beyond Europe, while the U.S. welcomes students from around the world. Within U.S. universities, Area Studies programs representing major cultural and geographical areas have developed. As one of the consequences of global political and economic integration, Iranian Studies is becoming increasingly important in the American curriculum. The American Institute of Iranian Studies (AIIrS) is a non-governmental consortium of American universities and museums that supports the advancement of the interdisciplinary study of Iranian civilization from the earliest periods to the present. Its purview comprises the historical Iranian world of Central Asia, the Middle East and South Asia as well as the modern political state of Iran. In the belief that involvement in person-to-person exchanges is the most effective way to build foundations of trust, the AIIrS aims to further opportunities for academic interaction between the U.S. and Iran. Facilitation of dialogue cannot fail to assist in the larger objective of improving international understanding and reducing the possibility of conflict.

Keywords/phrases: international exchange; education; collaboration; fellowships; conferences; Iranian Studies; Persianate

In the U.S., the larger objectives of the Institute are to represent American institutions of higher education and research in the field of Iranian Studies, and to promote the study of Iran as a significant component of world history.  The Institute works with humanists and social scientists to further Iranian Studies in the American curriculum. As one of the consequences of political and economic globalization, Iranian Studies is becoming increasingly important in the American curriculum. Persian has been taught for several decades now in all the major Middle East programs in the U.S., first as a classical language but since the 1970s also as a modern language. Academic attitudes toward Iranian Studies have changed as a result of the re-emergence of Iran as a major regional power in the 1960s and because of changes in academic priorities, including the rise of Area Studies and changes in the criteria for inclusion of particular languages in the curriculum. A particularly important factor is the forging of institutional relationships between the two countries; opportunities for direct intercourse will reinvigorate the academic resource base.

The Institute's central purpose is to provide an institutional infrastructure in Iran for the support of American academic research interests, and for collaboration and dialogue between American and Iranian students and scholars in the interdisciplinary study of Iranian civilization. The larger objectives of the Institute are to represent American institutions of higher education and research in the field of Iranian Studies, and to promote the academic field of Iranian Studies as a significant component of world history.

The Institute's central purpose is to provide an institutional infrastructure in Iran for the support of American academic research interests, and for collaboration and dialogue between American and Iranian students and scholars in the interdisciplinary study of Iranian civilization. The larger objectives of the Institute are to represent American institutions of higher education and research in the field of Iranian Studies, and to promote the academic field of Iranian Studies as a significant component of world history.

The AIIrS was created in response to the needs of the first generation of American researchers as the number of Iranists steadily increased in the late 1960s.  Through the 1970s, the Institute maintained a center in Tehran and provided a full range of services for American scholars in Iran, including accommodations, library, processing research requests to the Iranian government and other related assistance. Virtually every American scholar specializing in fields of Iranian Studies benefited from affiliation with the Institute. The center was obliged to suspend its activities in December 1979 following the rupture of diplomatic relations between the U.S. and Iran. For the next two decades, the Institute devoted itself to furthering Iranian Studies in the U.S., by offering graduate students grants and prizes for dissertations and dissemination of their work, holding joint conferences and fostering a sense of community in the field, among other initiatives.

When former President Khatami opened up the possibility of resumption of cultural dialogue in a CNN interview in 1998, the AIIrS responded immediately and was encouraged to make specific proposals. Since that time, the AIIrS has worked closely with the ambassadors at Iran’s Permanent Mission to the UN, who help to facilitate the visa process and make important connections for the programs in Iran. Language study was singled out as a priority Facilities for advanced Persian language study had not been available for American students in a Persian-speaking environment since 1979. As a result, no Americans had been trained to an advanced level in this major modern and classical language of Western and Southern Asia for two decades, and the continuity of academic programs was threatened.

because facilities for advanced Persian language study had not been available for American students in a Persian-speaking country since 1979. As a result, no Americans had been trained to an advanced level in this major modern and classical language of Western and Southern Asia for two decades, and the continuity of academic programs was threatened. A language program was therefore organized and the AIIrS was invited in 1998 to resume sending doctoral students for language training at the International Center for Persian Studies/Dehkhoda Institute, at the University of Tehran. This program continues today and allows students to enroll in one of three eight-week long sessions offered each year. All selected students are doctoral candidates at the intermediate level of Persian language proficiency who require advanced training in order to pursue dissertation research.

Encouraged by the success of the language program and the support of officials in Iran, the AIIrS moved ahead with new programs. A six-month fellowship was launched to allow a scholar at the junior faculty level to reside in Iran both to pursue research and function as overseer of the predoctoral fellows, assisting them with logistics and practical matters, while remaining in contact with our Dehkhoda sponsors. A one-month Bibliographer grant was designed for an American scholar with a professional interest in the history of research in Iran since 1979 and the current research establishment to conduct bibliographic research in Iran. Also for American scholars, a fellowship program was created for senior scholars and faculty, designed to bring practicing professional Iranists back into active interaction and collaboration with their Iranian colleagues by means short-term fellowships.  Senior fellows from various academic fields have since traveled to Iran to pursue research, give lectures, survey archaeological sites and attend conferences.  In 2002, AIIrS instituted yet another program, this one to bring Iranian scholars to the U.S. to pursue short-term research projects with colleagues in America.  These grants last up to one semester and are hosted by American institutions, which sponsor the visa applications. This year, a new language training program has been implemented in Tajikistan to expose students to the greater Persianate world and its dialects of Persian. It is hoped that this program will be expanded in the future to include research exchanges between the U.S. and Tajikistan.

Fellows
Fellows of the AIIrS pursue many fields within the humanities and social sciences, including language and literature, ancient and modern history, archaeology, art and architectural history, political sciences, philosophy, religion, sociology, and anthropology. Fellows also assist in composing lists of research facilities and resources in Iran that will be of use to future fellows. Examples of recent research topics undertaken by fellows, by field, include:

• Political and Social Science

Electoral processes in Iran, Egypt, Burma and the Philippines

Health and aging among Afghan refugees and underprivileged Iranians

Rural development in Iran

Theoretical and ideological debates among Iran’s Shi’ite thinkers

Comparative study of French, Russian and Iranian revolutions

Cognitive psychology and poetry as therapeutic tools in clinical practice

• Religion

Persianate Sufism

Women’s participation in the Shi’i community of remembrance

History and practice of Sufism in South Asia

Theoretical and ideological debates among Iran’s Shi’ite thinkers

Role of philosophy in religious education in Tehran

Dialogue between Islam and Christianity

• History

History of Iranian press and media

Archaeology and nationalism in the Middle East, 1919-1939

Eighteenth-century diplomatic relations between Iran and the Ottoman Empire

Role of British consuls in the strategic and economic interests in Iran 1889-1921

History of rational processes in Muslim scholarly culture

Historiography and diplomatic history of the Afsharid era

Development of perceptions of the Battle of Karbala in Islamic history

Early 20^th century political developments in Azerbaijan

• Language and Literature

Comparative verbal system of the Baluchi language

Semantic approaches to compilation of a Persian language thesaurus

English translation of the prose of Bayhaqi

Translation of Borhān al-Din Mohaqqeq Termezi's Ma‛āref, 13^th century prose text

Portrayals of the Bahram Gur period in literature

Literary dimensions in historiographic discourses of the Middle Ages

Akhlaq advice literature

Sufi poetry of ‘Attar

Urban and architectural poetry of the Safavid period

• Architectural/Art History and Archaeology

City of Tehran: past, present and future

Architectural education in Iran

Contemporary Iranian women artists

Modernity, national identity and monuments in 20^th century Iran

Images of modernity in Iranian visual culture during the rule of Reza Shah

Qajar calligraphy

17^th century Persian painting and the Armenian community of New Julfa

Timurid patronage of Sufi and Shaikhly families

Sassanian seals and bullae in the Iran National Museum

Bronze and Iron Age materials in the Iran National Museum

Archaeology of Iranian prehistoric periods

Macrobotanical material recovered from excavations in Fars Province

• Ethnomusicology

Role of music in relation to Iranian-American concepts of identity

Role of music in the political arena of identity in post-revolutionary Iran

AIIrS occasionally funds non-fellowship projects, including support for conferences, symposia and publications pertinent to the fields of Iranian Studies. Recent and upcoming projects that have received funding are:

• Translation from Japanese into English of the site reports from Sang-i Chakhmaq in northeastern Iran, one of the earliest Neolithic sites in the eastern part of the Middle East, excavated by the Japanese in the 1970s.

• Travel of American and Iranian scholars to present papers at a 2006 symposium "New Directions in Persian Carpet Studies" at the Textile Museum in Washington, DC.

• Photography exhibition on Bam after the earthquake, mounted at the United Nations and the Library of Congress, 2004.

• Volume of collected essays in honor of Robert H. Dyson, professor and curator emeritus at the University of Pennsylvania and director of the Hasanlu excavations.

• Conference in London on the writings of Jalal al-Din Rumi in honor of his 800^th anniversary.

• Attendance of young Iranian archaeologists at a panel discussion on current archaeology in Iran, at the annual conference of the American Schools of Oriental Studies, San Diego.

• Conference in Paris on preservation of early Persian material culture, organized by the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago.

• Hosting at the New York Academy of Art of a traveling exhibition of emerging Iranian artists.

• Travel of Iranian scholars to a symposium on the Ardabil shrine and carpets at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

• Conference on the Iranian economy, organized by the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign

The AIIrS seeks to broaden exchange of ideas between the U.S. and Iran by emphasizing translation of written works as well as through actual citizen contact. Although the AIIrS does not have funding for its own translation program, it offers an annual translation prize through a gift from the Lois Roth Endowment. Established in the memory of Lois Roth, who was instrumental in the founding of the Institute, the prize recognizes outstanding translations of literary texts from Persian to English. Recent awardees are:

• 2006: A Cup of Sin: Selected Poems, Simin Behbahani (Syracuse University Press, 1999): Edited and Translated by Farzaneh Milani and Kaveh Safa

• 2004: The Masnavi, Book One, Jalal al-Din Rumi (Oxford: Oxford University Press,

2004): Translated by Jawid Mojaddedi

• 2003: Haft Paykar, Nizami Ganjavi (Oxford University Press, 1995): Translated by Julie Meisami

• 2002: The Sands of Oxus: Boyhood Reminiscences of Sadriddin Aini (Costa Mesa, CA: Mazda Publications, 1998): Translated by John Perry and Rachel Lehr

• 2001: In the Dragon's Claws: The Story of Rostam & Esfandiyar, Ferdowsi (Washington, DC: Mage Publishers, 1999): Translated by Jerome W. Clinton

• 2000: The Conference of the Birds, Farid al-Din Attar (Harmondsworth, Middlesex/ New York: Penguin, 1984): Translated by Afkham Darbandi and Richard Davis

• 1999: My Uncle Napoleon, Iraj Pezeshkzad (Washington, DC: Mage Publishers, 1996): Translated by Richard Davis

Along with its own grants program, AIIrS works collaboratively with affiliated organizations with which it undertakes joint projects.

• Institute of International Education (IIE)

• Hollings Center

AIIrS has worked with the Hollings Center on its conferences on higher education in the Muslim world, inviting Iranian higher education professionals to participate. A future conference is being arranged on the topic of the state of Iranian Studies in the U.S., at which American and Iranian academics will present papers on the history of and trends in the various disciplines that constitute Iranian Studies; the proceedings will form the core of a planned volume on the subject.

• Digital Library for International Research (DLIR)

• International Society for Iranian Studies (ISIS)

AIIrS is an institutional member of ISIS (http://www.humanities.uci.edu/iranian-studies).

Like AIIrS, ISIS is a private, not-for-profit, non-political organization whose mission is to promote scholarship in the field and the teaching of Iranian Studies at the university level, and to facilitate exchange and collaboration among scholars. ISIS holds a biennial conference and AIIrS played a prominent role in this year’s Sixth Biennial Conference of Iranian Studies, held in London, acting as one of the principle supporting organizations of the conference and supplying travel grants for over thirty scholars from Iran to attend and present papers. The organizers and participants at the conference considered the large numbers of Iranians scholars in attendance (especially younger academics) to be a positive development for the field and a notable success for the conference.

For the near future, the Institute has formulated the following specific objectives:

to expand the flow of American students and scholars of Iranian Studies to Iran and other Persianate countries, and to enable senior Iranian scholars to pursue research in the U.S., thereby developing reciprocal opportunities. On the institutional level, AIIrS aims to assist the Iranian and American research and educational communities to build ties and formulate regular exchange mechanisms for scholars and resource materials. Because so little original work is translated, much scholarship produced in the U.S. and Iran remains unavailable to Iranians and Americans, respectively. To address this situation, AIIrS would like to shepherd the development of a translation center to support collaborative American-Iranian translations projects. And, when the political environment normalizes, AIIrS foresees the re-establishment of an actual research center to house scholars, support lecture series and symposia and provide a physical space for the meeting of the minds. It is hoped the work AIIrS now pursues will in some small way pave the path toward such a time.

About the Author

With a background in comparative ancient civilizations and archaeology (Yale, B.A.) and a doctorate in the archaeology and material culture of the ancient Near East (Institute of Fine Arts, New York University, Ph.D.), Erica Ehrenberg has expanded her pursuit of cultural interconnections to those in the modern world, specifically those between the U.S. and Middle East. While she continues to research and publish in her academic field, she directs the work of the American Institute of Iranian Studies to promote academic exchange between America and Iran, thereby combining study of the Middle East with dedication to furthering international understanding and contact through educational means.

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