Session 1: Saturday, February 6, 3-6 pm.
Almost a hundred audience members heard Michael Craig Hillmann’s analysis in English of Rumi’s “Song of the Reed” (the first 18 couplets of Masnavi-ye Ma’navi, Bijan Afkhami’s readings of seven Rumi poems from Divan-e Shams-e Tabrizi, and a lecture in Persian on “Rumi’s World” by Bahram Moshiri, Iranian American television personality, social critic, and political activist. Audience members found Afkhami’s readings inspirational and Moshiri’s lecture rich in background information.
Session 2: Sunday, February 7, 12 noon.
Students in UT’s Modern Persian Poetry Seminar met over lunch to discuss in Persian Rumi’s Poetry and Sohrab Sepehri’s Seda-ye Pa-ye Ab [The Sound/Voice of Water’s Footsteps]. Nastaran Kherad, Persian Studies Ph.D. candidate and author of In the House of My Bibi: Growing up in Revolutionary Iran, opened the discussion with a reading from Sepehri’s poem, and Koorosh Angali, Associate Professor of Persian at Defense Language Institute (Monterey, CA) and poet, painter, and musician, read and analyzed Sepehri’s “Sure-ye Tamaasha” [Stroll Sura] as a commentary on the nature of the Islam which the speaker of The Sound/Voice of Water’s Footsteps professes. The most successful such academic session ever at a UT Persian Studies literature conference, the discussion lasted almost five hours!
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“The Mystery of Rumi’s Religion,” a lecture in English by Koorosh Angali. In this lecture, Professor Angali, who has lectured at UT Austin on Khayyam and Ferdowsi and has produced two CDs of readings of poems by Rumi, will analyze key Rumi poems to resolve the controversial issue of the poet’s religious convictions.
AVAYA Auditorium (ACE 2.302) is in the Applied Computational Engineering and Sciences Building (ACE) on the UT Austin campus at 201 East 24th Street (southeast corner of Speedway and 24th). For directions, including parking options, google “AVAYA Auditorium Parking.”
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Session 4 : Tuesday, February 9, 9-11:30 am, Asian Culture Room,Texas Union 4.224 A Discussion (in Persian) of Rumi’s “Story of Daquqi,”featuring a paper by Anousha Shahsavari, UT Lecturer of Persian.
Session 5: Tuesday, February 9, 6-8 pm. Avaya Auditorium (ACE 2.302)
Iranian Music and Persian Poetry by Hadi Farasat and Friends. .A special performance by talented musicians
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