Bilal Hashmi is Administrative Coordinator with the Elahé Omidyar Mir-Djalali Institute of Iranian Studies at the University of Toronto, having previously held faculty appointments in the Department of Language Studies at the University of Toronto Mississauga and in the Department of Middle Eastern & South Asian Languages and Cultures at the University of Virginia. Additional roles at the Institute include serving as a Persian and Urdu cataloguer with Archives & Special Collections, UTM Library, and as Consulting Editor for Iran Namag, a bilingual quarterly of Iranian Studies. A translator and editor working in English, French, Hindi-Urdu, and Persian, he is a past president of the Literary Translators’ Association of Canada (2020-23). “The Infernal Times of Young Ayaz,” his English rendition of Reza Baraheni’s experimental 1972 Persian novel Rūzigār-i dūzakhī-yi āqā-yi Ayāz, was awarded a translation grant by the Canada Council for the Arts and is forthcoming from Quattro Books. He is presently at work on translating, also from the Persian, Hanūz dar safarī, the 2008 collection of verse by Pakistani Hazara poet Zakia Behroze. A scholarly monograph, tentatively titled “Studies in Twentieth-Century Indo-Persian Poetry and Thought,” is in its early stages of preparation.
