If a picture is worth a thousand words, one hundred original pictures should tell us a great deal about life in Iran a century ago. Original photos from the constitutional revolution period depicting life in Iran at the time will be on display at the exhibition which is accompanied by talks by Iranian scholars in Persian and Englsih. Dr. Mohamad Tavakoli-Targhi and Dr. Bonakdarian will present talks (Saturday 1:00 pm and Sunday at 2:00 pm) followed by Q & A.
Mansour Bonakdarian (University of Toronto at Mississauga; PhD, University of Iowa, 1991) teaches British, imperial, and comparative history. He has published extensively on topics ranging from Iranian women and British suffragists in the early twentieth century to the ideological cross-currents and interactions between Iranian and Indian nationalists from 1905 to 1921, and Iran and the Ottoman Empire at the First Universal Races Congress (London, 1911). He is the author of Britain and the Iranian Constitutional Revolution of 1906-1911: Foreign Policy, Imperialism, and Dissent (Syracuse University Press, 2006). His publications have appeared in various journals, including Iranian Studies, British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies, International Journal of Middle East Studies, Radical History Review, Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East, as well as in the Encyclopaedia Iranica and as book chapters. His current projects include a collected volume of essays (with Ian Christopher Fletcher) on the First Universal Races Congress and a monograph on the contentious confluences of nationalism, internationalism, and transnationalism in India, Iran, and Ireland, 1905-1921. His other ongoing research interests include “empathy and cross-cultural/cross-racial epistemology in the ‘Age of Empire’” and “global networks of ‘anti-imperialist’ nationalist solidarities and resistance to European imperialism in the early twentieth century.”
Mohamad Tavakoli-Targhi is Professor of History and Near and Middle Eastern
Civilizations at the University of Toronto and Professor of Historical Studies at the University of Toronto Mississauga, where he served as the founding Chair of a transdisciplinary Department of Historical Studies between 2004 and 2007. Since 2002 he has served as Editor-in-Chief of Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East, a Duke University Press journal, and has served on the editorial board of Iranian Studies, the journal of the International Society for Iranian Studies (ISIS). With Homa Katouzian, he is also the coeditor of Iranian Studies, a joint Routledge/ISIS book series. He is the President-Elect of the International Society for Iranian Studies.
Tavakoli's specializations encompass the interrelated fields of Iranian Modernity, Nationalism and Occidentalism. He is the author of two books, Refashioning Iran: Orientalism, Occidentalism and Nationalist Historiography (Palgrave, 2001) and Tajaddud-i Bumi [Vernacular Modernity] (in Persian, Nashr-i Tarikh, 2003). He has authored numerous articles in journals and edited volumes. In addition to a visual account of modern Iran, he is currently completing a monograph tentatively titled, “All that was Holy in Iran.”