Micheal Craig Hillman: Reading Forough Farrokhzad’s Poems Poetically

Join host, Yasamin Jameh, in learning about the work of Craig Hillman, one of the foremost American scholars of Persian poetry and literary history.  
The 36th episode of Parse is an excerpt from a lecture given by Michael Craig Hillman where does a close reading of Forugh Farrokhzad’s poems and analyzes them through the lens of American Formalism.   
Hillman is a professor of ⁠Persian Studies⁠ at the ⁠University of Texas at Austin.⁠ He specializes in lyric Persian verse, Persian prose fiction from the 1920s through the 1970s, and literary autobiography. Since the late 1990s, he has focused on Persian instructional materials development, resulting in a new Persian language learning syllabus in four volumes called “Persian for America(ns).” Hillman profound interest in Persian culture and poetry began in 1965 when as an American Peace Corps Volunteer, he served for two years as an English instructor at the University of Mashhad. His new-found fascination with the Persian language, led Hillman to complete his graduate study at The Oriental Institute at The University of Chicago. With a Fulbright dissertation grant, Hillmann returned to Iran in September 1969 to conduct research on the poetry of Hafez, and completed four years of graduate study in Persian Literature at The University of Tehran. 
He has published two autobiographical books titled From Durham to Tehran (1991) and From Classroom to Courtroom (2008). In the 2020s, Hillmann’s research and writing focuses mostly on formalist analyses of Persian poems.  His latest book, From and to a Village in Maine is forthcoming. 
To watch the full talk, click here: ⁠Craig Hillman – 18 March 2022 – Lecture⁠