Shahrouz Khanjari defended his Ph.D. dissertation, entitled “Rasīd Waṭwāṭ’s Innovations in Arabic and Persian Rhetoric in Ḥadāʾiq al-Siḥr,” on May 28, 2021, at the Institute of Islamic Studies at McGill University. He also holds a Ph.D. in Persian Literature from the University of Tehran, for which he defended his dissertation, entitled “The Analysis of Conceptual Metaphors in Niẓāmī Ganjawī’s Ḵamsa (the quintet),” in July 2014.
Equipped with a rich background in poetics and literary criticism and profound familiarity with the philology of classical Persian and Arabic literature, he focuses his research primarily on medieval and modern rhetoric and the art of eloquence. His doctoral dissertation at McGill University identifies the system through which figures of speech are presented in Waṭwāṭ’s Ḥadāʾiq al-Siḥr fī Daqāʾiq al-Šiʿr (Gardens of Magic in the Minutiae of Poetry) and analyzes the book’s function in understanding medieval criteria for evaluating literary works. His doctoral dissertation at the University of Tehran examines the issues of traditional rhetoric, especially the bayān (elucidation) discipline, and analyzes metaphor, metonymy, and simile in Niẓāmī’s oeuvre through a cognitive approach.
He has authored and translated books and articles in the field of Classical Persian Literature. Being multilingual, he is also interested in comparative literature, the history of languages, and etymology. His other interests include ancient mythologies, modern poetry, fiction, and art cinema.