The Latifeh Yarshater Award was instituted by the Persian Heritage Foundation to honor the memory of Latifeh Yarshater and her lifelong dedication to the improvement of Iranian women's human rights. The purpose of the award is to encourage scholarship in Iranian Studies focused on the condition of women in Persian speaking societies and to promote women's rights in these societies.
2024 Award Committee
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Rudi Matthee, PHF Trustee (Chair)
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Mirjam Künkler
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Mojdeh Yarshater
Eligibility
The award in the amount of $3000. is biannual, granted to a work that is 1) of superior scholarship; 2) published within two years prior to the award and 3) satisfies the following criteria of eligibility:
A. Covers one of the areas of women's studies related to Persian speaking societies.
B. Makes a direct or indirect contribution to the improvement of the status of women in those societies.
C. Is innovative in subject matter and approach and expands the parameters of the field.
Works in English are the primary focus of the award. Persian, French, and German works are considered only exceptionally when there is unanimous agreement on their high merit.
The application is submitted to the Latifeh Yarshater Award committee of the Persian Heritage Foundation. The chairperson of the committee is Mojdeh Yarshater. Applicants may contact PHF at www.persianheritagefoundation.org, or through email at info@persianheritagefoundation.org.
2024 Winner
- Awardee: Azadeh Kian, Rethinking Gender, Ethnicity and Religion (I. B. Tauris, 2023)
2022 Winner
- Awardee: Liora Hendleman-Bavuur, for Creating the Iranian Woman
- Honorable Mention: Alyssa Gabbay, Gender and Succession in Medieval and Early Modern Islam
- Honorable Mention: Mateo Farzaneh, Iranian Women and Gender in the Iran-Iraq War
2020 Winner
Nazanin Shahrokni (Assistant Professor of Gender and Globalization at the London School of Economics and Political Science), Women in Place: The Politics of Gender Segregation in Iran. University of California Press, 2019.
2018 Award
The Latifeh Yarshater Award was awarded at the 2018 Biennial Conference, University of California, Irvine to Dr. Ida Meftahi, Lecturer in contemporary Iranian culture and society at the Roshan Institute for Persian Studies, University of Maryland, for her book Gender and Dance in Modern Iran: Biopolitics on Stage (2016, Hardback), Routledge. The committee praised the book’s originality in situating dance at the center of the nationalist and Islamist cultural and political contestations of the 20th century, offering an absorbing account of the transformation of cabaret dancing into “national dance” and the sublimation of the latter into Islamic counter-dance or “rhythmic movement.” Based on original Persian sources, Dr. Meftahi historicizes the offstage politico-ideological narratives of dancing women in competing nationalist, leftist, and Islamist discourses. Exploring the public emergence of the “rhythmic movement” in the 1990s, which sought to endow dance with Islamic modesty and chastity, she demonstrates how this Islamizing project successfully sublimated an earlier nationalist conception of dance. Despite politically charged presumptions of dance as moral decadence, in the decade after the Islamic Revolution, dance has emerged as an integral part of social life in Iran. The Committee also recognized Professor Nima Naghibi's book, Women Write Iran: Nostalgia and Human Rights from the Diaspora (2016), University of Minnesota Press, as the Honorable Mention.
2016 Award
The Latifeh Yarshater Award was awarded and presented at the 2016 Biennial Conference in Vienna, Austria to Mirrors of Entrapment and Emancipation. Forugh Farrokhzad and Sylvia Plath by Leila Rahimi Bahmany (August 2015) and When They Broke Down the Door. Poems by Fatemeh Shams. Introduced and Translated by Dick Davis in Bilingual Text (January 2016).
2014 Award
The Latifeh Yarshater Award was awarded and presented at the 2014 Biennial Conference in Montreal, Canada to Shahrnush Parsipur, novelist and short story writer.