Sonia Balassanian: Writing the lmpossible

Claudia Yaghoobi is a Roshan Institute Associate Professor in Persian Studies at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. She is the author of Temporary Marriage in Iran: Gender and Body Politics in Modern Iranian Literature and Film (Cambridge UP, 2020) and Subjectivity in ‘Attar, Persian Sufism, and European Mysticism (Purdue UP, 2017).

Focusing on Iranian-Armenian poet/artist Sonia Balassanian’s works, Yaghoobi argues that Balassanian treats writing (and art generally) as a medium which allows her to write the impossible, namely the 1915 Genocide.