Azar Nafisi is an Iranian-American writer and professor of English literature.
33 Facts About Azar Nafisi
2.
Azar Nafisi is the niece of a famous Iranian scholar, fiction writer and poet Saeed Nafisi.
3.
Azar Nafisi is best known for her 2003 book Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books, which remained on The New York Times Best Seller list for 117 weeks, and has won several literary awards, including the 2004 Non-fiction Book of the Year Award from Booksense.
4.
Azar Nafisi is the daughter of Nezhat and Ahmad Nafisi, the former mayor of Tehran from 1961 to 1963.
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Azar Nafisi was the youngest man ever appointed to the post at that time.
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Azar Nafisi was raised in Tehran, but when she was thirteen, she moved to Lancaster, England, to finish her studies.
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Azar Nafisi then moved to Switzerland before returning to Iran briefly in 1963.
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Azar Nafisi completed her degree in English and American literature and received her Ph.
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Azar Nafisi returned to Iran in 1979, after the Iranian Revolution and taught English literature at the University of Tehran.
10.
In 1995, Azar Nafisi sought to resign from her position, but the University did not accept her resignation.
11.
From 1995 to 1997, Azar Nafisi invited several female students to attend regular meetings at her house every Thursday morning.
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Azar Nafisi taught novels by F Scott Fitzgerald, Henry James and Jane Austen, attempting to understand and interpret them from a modern Iranian perspective.
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Azar Nafisi's cover story, "The Veiled Threat: The Iranian Revolution's Woman Problem," published in The New Republic has been reprinted in several languages.
14.
Azar Nafisi wrote the new introduction to the Modern Library Classics edition of Tolstoy's Hadji Murad, as well as the introduction to Iraj Pezeshkzad's My Uncle Napoleon, published by Modern Library.
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Azar Nafisi has published a children's book BiBi and the Green Voice.
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Azar Nafisi served as director of the Johns Hopkins University's School of Advanced International Studies Dialogue Project and Cultural Conversations, a Georgetown Walsh School of Foreign Service Centennial Fellow, and a fellow at Oxford University.
17.
In 2003, Azar Nafisi published Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books.
18.
In 2008, Azar Nafisi authored a memoir about her mother titled Things I've Been Silent About: Memories of a Prodigal Daughter.
19.
On October 21,2014, Azar Nafisi authored The Republic of Imagination: America in Three Books, in which using The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Babbitt, and The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, as well as the writings of James Baldwin and many others, Azar Nafisi responds to an Iranian reader that questioned whether Americans care about or need their literature.
20.
Azar Nafisi's forthcoming book, Read Dangerously: The Subversive Power of Literature in Troubled Times will be published on March 8,2022.
21.
Azar Nafisi has lectured and written extensively in English and Persian on the political implications of literature and culture, the human rights of Iranian women and girls and the important role they play in the change process for pluralism and open society in Iran.
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Azar Nafisi has been consulted on issues related to Iran and human rights by policy makers and various human rights organizations in the US and elsewhere.
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Azar Nafisi is involved in promoting not just literacy but of reading books with universal literary value.
24.
Azar Nafisi received the 2015 Benjamin Franklin Creativity Laureate Award.
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Azar Nafisi has been awarded honorary doctorates from Susquehanna University, Pomona College, Mt.
26.
Azar Nafisi's books have received critical acclaim from authors, publishing houses, and newspapers.
27.
Azar Nafisi appeared on Late Night with Seth Meyers, and PBS NewsHour to promote the book.
28.
In 2004, Christopher Hitchens wrote that Nafisi had dedicated Reading Lolita in Tehran to Paul Wolfowitz, the United States Deputy Secretary of Defense under George W Bush and a principal architect of the Bush Doctrine.
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Hitchens had stated that Azar Nafisi was good friends with Wolfowitz and several other key figures in the Bush administration.
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Azar Nafisi later responded to Hitchen's comments, neither confirming nor denying the claim.
31.
Azar Nafisi labeled Nafisi as a "comprador intellectual," a comparison to the "treasonous" Chinese employees of mainland British firms, who sold out their country for commercial gain and imperial grace.
32.
Critics like Dabashi have accused Azar Nafisi of having close relations with neoconservatives.
33.
Azar Nafisi responded to Dabashi's criticism by stating that she is not, as Dabashi claims, a neoconservative, that she opposed the Iraq war, and that she is more interested in literature than politics.