Reza Taher-Kermani
Assistant Professor
Department: English
Faculty: Arts and Science
| Phone: | (514) 848-2424 ext. 5211 | |
| Email: | reza.taherkermani@concordia.ca |
Expertise:
Nineteenth-century English literature; Medieval Persian poetry; Empire and colonialism; Iranian Studies; Translation studies
Language(s) spoken:
English, Persian (Farsi)
Professional associations:
PhD
My research centres on two main areas: medieval (classical) Persian poetry as world literature and nineteenth-century British literature and culture, with a particular emphasis on the comparative dynamics through which Persian poetry was received, represented, and reimagined in English literary writing over the long nineteenth century.
My work in this field includes the monograph, The Persian Presence in Victorian Poetry (Edinburgh University Press, 2020), as well as peer-reviewed articles and review essays published in Essays in Criticism, The Review of English Studies, Victorian Literature and Culture, Iranian Studies, Translation and Literature, Middle Eastern Literatures, Journal of British Studies, and Victoriographies.
My first book, The Persian Presence in Victorian Poetry, explores the complex imaginative geography of “Persia” in the nineteenth century by tracing how historical, intellectual, and political entanglements informed British literary engagements with Persian themes and texts.
My research engages modern critical approaches, particularly postcolonialism and decoloniality, while remaining rooted in a comparative methodology that moves across languages, periods, and genres. In recent years, I have written on figures such as Firdausi, Omar Khayyam, Attar, Hafiz, Jami, Edward FitzGerald, Matthew Arnold, Robert Browning, Edward Byles Cowell, and Ralph Waldo Emerson, and addressed broader contexts including the reception of Persian poetry in Britain and America, Anglo-Iranian relations, the cultural politics of the “Great Game”, translation and adaptation, and the evolving dynamics of literary Orientalism.
I am currently preparing, for Oxford University Press, the first critical edition of Edward FitzGerald’s Bird-Parliament, his translation of Attar’s Mantiq ul-Teyr.
