Leila Rahimi Bahmany

Leila Rahimi Bahmany is an adjunct lecturer of Persian Culture and Literature at the Goethe University Frankfurt am Main. She obtained her PhD from the Freie Universität Berlin (2012). Her first book, Mirrors of Entrapment and Emancipation: Forugh Farrokhzad and Sylvia Plath (Leiden University Press, 2015), received the Latifeh Yarshater Award in 2016. Currently, she is working on two projects. One of them is a monograph, aiming to present a critical biography and a study of the literary works of a modern Iranian novelist and short story writer, Simin Daneshvar (1921–2012). It discusses the concept of modernity and the literal and cultural liminality presented through the author’s, and her protagonists’, sense of confusion and internal conflict.
The other project, on which she will concentrate during her fellowship at the Oxford Nizami Ganjavi Centre, is a book-length study of prose narrative works published in Azeri Turkish in Iran (1945–2000). It covers the intellectual and literary involvements of the most prominent Azeri authors of this period and analyses the nature of the literature they produced, such as its provinciality and anchorage in the local, its reactionary essence as well as the tension found in these works with power and ideology notably the relationship with the centre of cultural authority and political power in Iran.