Zahiremami, Parisa

Parisa Zahiremami is a teaching fellow in the Foundation Year Program at the University of King’s College, Halifax. She received her BA in Persian literature at Shiraz University, Iran, an MA in modern Persian literature and history at the University of Toronto, and a Ph.D. in medieval Persian literature and Islamic mysticism at the same university. Her research broadly examines the relationship between politics and poetics in medieval texts and their reception into the modern period in Iran, Central Asia, and South Asia. Her doctoral dissertation, titled “Cosmopolitanism, Poetry, and Kingship: The Ideal Ruler in Sanāʾī’s Poetry,” traces the political use of mystical poetry back to the formative period of Sufism. The dissertation explores the synthesis of Islamic political ethics, Sufism, Shiʿism, and Neoplatonic philosophy in the portrayal of an ideal ruler in the poetry of the twelfth-century Persian poet Sanāʾī.

In addition to working on a book proposal based on her doctoral dissertation, Parisa is working on a related project, which examines the reception history of Sanāʾī’s theory of kingship and its role in the politicization of Islamic mysticism in the medieval Persianate world between the twelfth and the sixteenth centuries.