Afghanistan Encounters with Music and Friends is a personal account based on the author’s past fieldwork experiences in different regions of Afghanistan and more recent work in Kabul spanning some forty-four years from 1966 to 2010. Although the fieldwork is...

For over a century, solo improvised dance, especially belly dance, has had enormous popularity, and by the 1970s and 1980s in the wake of the feminist movement, over a million women in the United States, and many more thousands in Western Europe became...

Choreophobia is the term coined by Dr. Shay, in this first full-length study of Iranian dance, to characterize the widespread ambiguous and negative reactions to solo improvised dance, the most popular dance form in the Iranian world. This dance form appears...

Mirza Fath-Ali Akhundzadeh (1812-78) was the father of modern Azerbaijani and Persian drama, a man of letters, propagator of a new alphabet, and one of the most outspoken free-thinkers of the Islamic world in the nineteenth century. A reformer and liberal,...

Dance in the Persianate World is a rich collected volume featuring the most up-to-date writings that addresses multiple issues surrounding dance, its performance and its reception throughout the Persianate world and constitutes a sequel to Anthony...

When World War I ended in 1918, the world had changed. The face of Europe was reshaped, its boundaries altered, and Communism had taken over Russia. Many Americans were there to witness this, among them Merian C. Cooper, an Air Force pilot, Ernest B....

Mortezá Varzi came from an artistically inclined family and developed his interest and knowledge in music through association with important musicians of his day. He studied the kamanche with Asghar Bahari, the acknowledged master of that instrument. Varzi...

This volume is a collection of 10 plays written in the 1960's and 1970's in Iran, when the Persian theater is considered to have come of age. Their significance lies partly in their depiction of aspects of Iranian society and life during those decades when...

In this book, Prof. M. R. Ghanoonparvar explores the differences between the narrative strategies of Iranian filmmakers and modernist Persian fiction writers. While most published studies on Iranian cinema and Persian fiction focus either on literature or on...

In this book anthropologist William O. Beeman presents the rich tapestry of Iranian traditional performance traditions—traditions that have cultural roots dating many centuries before Western contact. Readers who are unfamiliar with Iranian culture...