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September 2022
NELC Welcome Reception Fall 2022
Please join us for a fall reception at Royce Hall to commemorate the past and celebrate the upcoming academic year in the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Cultures. The event will be held on the balcony of Royce 306. Self-pay parking is available in UCLA lots 2, 3, 4, and 5. Please view the UCLA Interactive Map for location details. RSVP
Read More about NELC Welcome Reception Fall 2022June 2022
Bilingual Lecture Series: Nahid Pirnazar
Judeo Persian Writings an original comprehensive collection published in 2021 gives parallel examples in Judeo Persian and Perso Arabic script and their translations into English Most Judeo Persian documents not only reflect the twenty seven centuries of Jewish life in Iran, but they are also a testament to their intellectual, cultural, and socioeconomic conditions The significant value of such documents is found in the areas of linguistics, history, sociocultural and literary issues, in the form of verse and prose As…
Read More about Bilingual Lecture Series: Nahid PirnazarLove, Service, and the State: An analysis of communication and persuasion in Old Kingdom Egyptian letters and decrees
This research explores how self-perception and royal ideology shaped and legitimized the ethics of community behavior and hierarchical interaction at the end of the Egyptian Old Kingdom (ca. 2700-2200 BCE). First, my analysis of politeness in private letters determines the ancient Egyptian behavioral expectations around inferiors, superiors, and equals. Subsequently, I investigate how the pharaoh’s rhetoric instrumentalized the community focus seen in letters to shape his ideology of state service in royal letters and decrees. Critical Discourse Analysis reveals that…
Read More about Love, Service, and the State: An analysis of communication and persuasion in Old Kingdom Egyptian letters and decreesBecoming a Titan: Hermann Grapow’s Position in Egyptology and National Socialist Initiatives for the Humanities, 1938–45
This lecture will be a case study of the academic and political roles of one of the most prominent German Egyptologists of the 20th century during the second part of the Nazi period: Hermann Grapow (1885–1967). Grapow, Professor of Egyptology at the University of Berlin and a senior administrator of the university and the Prussian Academy of Arts and Sciences between 1938 and 1945, was instrumental in repositioning Egyptology during these years under his own leadership, and to open the…
Read More about Becoming a Titan: Hermann Grapow’s Position in Egyptology and National Socialist Initiatives for the Humanities, 1938–45May 2022
The World of Ancient Iran and the West
An International Symposium Convened by M. Rahim Shayegan (University of California, Los Angeles) and Jeffrey Spier (J. Paul Getty Museum) May 19–20, 2022 | 314 Royce Hall Morning Refreshments: 8:00 am Symposium Begins: 9:00 am The Pourdavoud Center for the Study of the Iranian World and the J. Paul Getty Museum are convening for a third year an international symposium on the exchanges between ancient Iran and the Classical world. This year’s symposium, held at UCLA over two days (May…
Read More about The World of Ancient Iran and the WestBilingual Lecture Series: The Performance of Female Masculinity in Lalehzari Music
The Performance of Female Masculinity in Lalehzari Music The Arabic-infused Iranian popular musical genre, Lalehzari (or Kucheh-Bazari), was well liked amongst Iran’s underclass in the last few decades before the 1979 Revolution. In the sixties and seventies, the taste for Lalehzari music clearly indicated a lower social class and was associated by mainstream culture with debauchery, even criminality, and a lack of social consciousness. This project explores ways that the female Lalehzari performers rejected the features of conventional femininity imposed…
Read More about Bilingual Lecture Series: The Performance of Female Masculinity in Lalehzari MusicBilingual Lecture Series: اجراگری مردانگی توسط زنان هنرمند در موسیقی لاله‌زاری
اجراگری مردانگی توسط زنان هنرمند در موسیقی لاله‌زاری The Arabic-infused Iranian popular musical genre, Lalehzari (or Kucheh-Bazari), was well liked amongst Iran’s underclass in the last few decades before the 1979 Revolution. In the sixties and seventies, the taste for Lalehzari music clearly indicated a lower social class and was associated by mainstream culture with debauchery, even criminality, and a lack of social consciousness. This project explores ways that the female Lalehzari performers rejected the features of conventional femininity imposed…
Read More about Bilingual Lecture Series: اجراگری مردانگی توسط زنان هنرمند در موسیقی لاله‌زاریGilgamesh and the Translation of Philological Crises
This year, the Babylonian epic Gilgamesh celebrates the 150th anniversary of its modern rediscovery in 1872: since then, the epic has swept like a Flood through the literary world, and it continues to be celebrated as the oldest entry in the literary canon. In this talk, Sophus Helle offers an introduction to the epic and its modern afterlife, focusing on the particular challenges that face the translators of premodern texts, who must contend with the cruxes and crises that come…
Read More about Gilgamesh and the Translation of Philological CrisesBilingual Lecture Series: Fatemeh Shams
تنش شعر و قدرت در ایران ِ پس از انقلاب The Tension Between Poetry and Power in Post-Revolutionary Iran شعر و شاعران چه نقشی در پیروزی انقلاب ۵۷ و به مسند نشاندن حاکمان جمهوری اسلامی داشتند؟ چرا حاکمان جمهوری اسلامی به شعر اهمیت می‌دهند؟ شاعران حکومتی چه کسانی هستند و چگونه به عرصه شعر بعد از انقلاب وارد شدند؟ آنها توسط چه کسانی حمایت می‌شوند و از چه می‌نویسند؟ چه ارتباطی میان شعر، زبان، استبداد، و خاطره جمعی وجود دارد؟…
Read More about Bilingual Lecture Series: Fatemeh ShamsApril 2022
‘Aqām al-ḥajj Fulān’: The Leaders of Abbasid Pilgrimage in the Early Islamic Annalistic Tradition
The caliph Hārūn al-Rashīd (d. 193/809) allegedly led the ḥajj nine times over the course of his twenty-three-year reign, in 188/804 he was also the last ʿAbbāsid caliph to lead the pilgrimage rites. The pilgrimage served as a means of legitimation as well as a place of succession and nomination, with Hārūn and his wife Zubayda bt. Jaʿfar (from whence the Darb Zubayda) in particular undergoing extensive infrastructural works on the pilgrimage route. The leaders of the ḥajj – and…
Read More about ‘Aqām al-ḥajj Fulān’: The Leaders of Abbasid Pilgrimage in the Early Islamic Annalistic Tradition