The Poetics of Threshold

Farzaneh Milani completed her graduate studies in comparative literature at the University of California, Los Angeles. Her dissertation, “Forugh Farrokhzad: A Feminist Perspective,” is a critical study of the poetry of a pioneering Iranian poet. A past president of the Association of Middle Eastern Women Studies in America, Milani was the recipient of an All University Teaching Award in 1998 and nominated for Virginia Faculty of the Year in 1999. Milani has published over 100 articles, epilogues, forewords, and afterwords in Persian and English. She has served as the guest editor for two special issues of Nimeye-Digar, a Persian-language feminist journal (on Simin Daneshvar and Simin Behbahani); Iran Nameh (on Behbahani); and Iranian Studies (on Behbahani). She has written for the New York Times, the Washington Post, Christian Science Monitor, Ms. Magazine, Readers Digest, USA Today, Daily Progress, and NPR’s All Things Considered. She has presented more than 250 lectures nationally and internationally. A former director of Studies in Women and Gender and chair of the Department of Middle Eastern and South Asian Languages and Cultures, Milani is currently Raymond J. Nelson Professor of Persian Literature and Women Studies at the University of Virginia.

In the poetic and narratological architecture of Iranian literature in general and women’s literary tradition in particular, thresholds hold a special place. This is an in-between space; a relational rather than oppositional space, a space that disrupts binary modes of thought. Standing at the intersection of East and West, inside and outside, local and global, Iranian women writers and poets are reorganizing the literary, political, cultural, and discursive landscapes of Iran and achieving the level of national and international recognition they richly deserve.