ICM LECTURE SERIES SPRING 2025
MOHAMAD TAVAKOLI-TARGI (University of Toronto)
"Iranian Matriotism and Curative Modernity"
Thursday, February 27, 2025
Goldwin Smith Hall G22 | 4:45pm—6:15pm | Reception to Follow
Abstract:
Similar to dissection in modern medicine, the colonization of Egypt and India endowed the late nineteenth-century Iranian observers of Russian and British encroachment with a “death-bearing” vision of Iran as a sovereign motherland. By anthropomorphizing Iran as a dying mother, they provided compelling “illness scripts” for a curative modernity intent on restoring and rejuvenating Iran’s national life. Based on an in-depth exploration of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Iranian historical and political archives, Tavakoli explains how Iranian “diagnosticians” transformed conventional narratives of the rise and fall of dynasties to retrospective diagnoses of Greek, Arab, and Mongolian “diseases” that had led to the paralysis of the motherland’s “governing organs” on the eve of the Constitutional Revolution of 1905-1909.
Bio:
Mohamad Tavakoli-Targhi, the Inaugural Director of the Elahé Omidyar Mir-Djalali Institute of Iranian Studies, is Professor of Historical Studies, History, and Near and Middle Eastern Civilizations at the University of Toronto. He was the founding Chair of the Department of Historical Studies at the University of Toronto-Mississauga (2004-07) and has served as President of the International Society for Iranian Studies (2008-10). In addition to serving as Editor-in-Chief of Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East (2001-2012), a Duke University Press journal, he was the Editor of Iran Nameh (2011-2015). Currently, he is the editor-in-chief of Iran Namag, a bilingual quarterly of Iranian Studies, and co-editor of the Iranian Studies book series published by Routledge. Tavakoli is the author of Refashioning Iran: Orientalism, Occidentalism and Historiography (2001) and Tajaddud-i Bumi [Vernacular Modernity] (2003). With critical introductions in Persian, he has edited Civilizational Wisdom: Selected Works of Ehsan Yarshater(2015); Jahangir Amuzgar: Selected Economic Essays (2015); and Ayin-i Danishjuyan: The First University of Tehran Student Journal (2016). Additionally, he is the Editor-in-Chief of Cinema Iranica & Women Poets Iranica, two digital research compendia. Tavakoli has published numerous historiographical articles in English and Persian on Iranian modernity, matriarchal nationalism, biopolitics, governmentality, and clerico-engineering. He is currently completing a monograph, “Pathologizing Iran,” which explores the emergence of modern diagnostic historical narratives and prognostic conceptions of politics. Tavakoli-Targhi is the recipient of two Outstanding Teacher awards from Illinois State University (1996 and 2001) and has held visiting fellowships at St. Antony’s College, Oxford University (1998), the Center for Historical Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University (New Delhi, 1992–93); and Harvard University (1991–92). He holds a BA in Political Science, an MA in History from the University of Iowa, and a Ph.D. in History from the University of Chicago.
