Best-Selling Author Azar Nafisi Opens 2006 Wooster Forum

Azar Nafisi

WOOSTER, Ohio - Iranian-born professor and internationally acclaimed author Azar Nafisi will open The College of Wooster's 2006 Forum series with a discussion of her best-selling book Reading Lolita in Tehran on Tuesday, Sept. 12, at 7:30 p.m. in McGaw Chapel (340 E. University St.). The 2006 Wooster Forum series, titled "Piety and Heresy: Conforming to and Transcending One's Culture," is free and open to the public.

Nafisi's gripping memoir recounts the personal and intellectual exchanges among seven young women in a private literature class she started in Tehran. Every week, these women would come to Nafisi's house, remove their chadors and scarves, and discuss such classic works as Lolita, Madame Bovary, and The Great Gatsby - all of which were considered controversial and dangerous in post-revolutionary Iran. Her book, which was chosen as the required summer reading for the incoming class of first-year students at Wooster, provides an interpretation of these classics from an Iranian woman's perspective.

Now a visiting professor and director of the Dialogue Project at the Foreign Policy Institute of Johns Hopkins University's School of Advanced International Studies in Washington, D.C., Nafisi specializes in aesthetics and the relationship between culture and politics. She has returned to Iran several times to conduct workshops for women on the link between culture and human rights. The material gathered from these workshops has formed the basis of a new human rights education curriculum. "I left Iran, but Iran did not leave me," said Nafisi who moved to the U.S. in 1997. "You need imagination in order to imagine a future that doesn't exist," added Nafisi, who envisions a time when women will be treated equally in her native Iran. Her experiences, both as a professor of English Literature at the University of Tehran and as a woman, contributed to what would become a bestselling book.

Nafisi will sign copies of her book at a reception immediately following her Forum lecture in Freedlander Lobby. Copies of the book will be available for purchase at the reception from The College of Wooster's Florence O. Wilson Bookstore.

The Wooster Forum provides a resource for the academic and intellectual life at The College of Wooster and in the community at large by providing an opportunity for meaningful dialogue among all participants. The next Forum event will be Thursday, Sept. 28, when DJ Spooky, a professional musician specializing in the illibient and trip-hop music genres, presents "Rebirth of a Nation," an audio/visual remix of D.W. Griffith's 1915 pro-segregation movie, "The Birth of a Nation." For additional information about the Wooster Forum, call 330-263-2132.