Azar Nafisi
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Azar Nafisi (آذر نفیسی in Persian) (born 1955) is an Iranian born professor and writer who currently resides in the United States. Nafisi gained fame in 2003 with her book Reading Lolita in Tehran: a Memoir in Books. She is currently a Visiting Fellow and lecturer at the Foreign Policy Institute of the Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) in Washington, DC.
Prior to her arrival in the United States, Nafisi had been a professor of English literature at the University of Tehran, and had also taught at the Allameh Tabatabaii University). 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. Nafisi had visited the United States several times before the revolution and 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 would study such books as Lolita and Madame Bovary, literary works considered controversial and even dangerous to read in post-revolutionary Iranian society, among others such as The Great Gatsby, and novels from Henry James and Jane Austen, attempting to understand and interpret them from a modern Iranian perspective.
Nafisi finally left Iran on June 24, 1997, moving to the United States, where she became close friends with Paul Wolfowitz, who introduced her to the writings of Leo Strauss. Encouraged by Wolfowitz and others to write about her experiences, Nafisi wrote the bestseller 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." 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.
External link
- Nafisi's Dialogue Project (http://dialogueproject.sais-jhu.edu/)