The Emergence of a Persian Whitman in 1922

Robson, E., ‘Pasts and futures entwined: supporting humanities and culture for a sustainable Iraq’, The Middle East in London 11/4 (Iraq—People and Heritage): 19–20.

2015

2020

This paper explores the photographic collection of the Swiss trader and entrepreneur Karl Emil Alpiger (1841–1905) compiled in Iran during the 1880s and 1890s. From the early 1870s to 1896, the Anglo-Swiss company Ziegler & Co based in Manchester appointed Alpiger to set up carpet manufacturing and to lead a trading post in the small city of Sultanabad (today Arak). Over the course of the period of more than two decades that Alpiger headed this trading post, he increasingly paid heed to the calls of the geographical societies of his homeland to gather material testimonials from lands afar and unknown places so as to prepare Switzerland for the inevitably arising challenges of global economics. In addition to his extensive collection of Persian weapons, local textiles, everyday garments, and handicrafts, he also collected around 500 photographs compiled into four photo albums. In 2010, this corpus of photographs, together with the outstanding textile and garment collections, was transferred from Alpiger’s family estate to the Museum Rietberg in Zurich. This paper sets the framework for discussion by way of providing detailed insights into the Emil Alpiger collection pertaining to Alpiger’s collective endeavours in Qajar Iran, its motifs and intentions, historiography and subsequent reception. Thereafter, the emphasis is placed specifically on the photographic part of Alpiger’s collection. The photographs reveal a broad diversity of themes: From the ramifications of global expansion on economic structures in Western Iran, to the transformation of coastal regions owing to global trade, and even to the cultivation of tobacco and poppy monocultures for the export of opium. Lastly, there are a number of photographs that display the social and cultural life of Soltanabad, its rites, festivals and street scenes. This paper intends to shed light on the significance of historical photographs as instruments of social and historical research of a highly transformative period for an Iran on the brink of modernity. Transposing into the specific, the paper hones in on a group of photographs that reveal unique insights into the social and economic transformations that unfolded in Soltanabad, a crucial production and trading center in Western Iran towards the end on the nineteenth century.

2018

The 9th European Conference of Iranian Studies (ECIS9), September 9th-13th, 2019, 2019

The project IRANKORAN (funded by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research BMBF 2018-2020) aims at surveying early Quranic manuscripts kept in Iranian collections to study the history of the Qurʾān based on material evidence. Images of Quranic manuscripts from accessible Iranian museums and libraries, together with their metadata, are recorded in an online digital catalogue ("BIBLIOTHECA CORANICA IRANICA"). Manuscripts transliterations display different levels of readability, modifications, erasures etc., but also differences from the prevalent shape of the Qurʾān (Cairo edition 1924). The description and analysis of manuscripts shows textual differences of the manuscripts from the canonical readings recorded by Ibn Muǧāhid (died 936). For the dating of manuscripts, paleographical classification and radiocarbon measurements of the writing material (C-14 analysis) are carried out in cooperation with the Laboratory of Ion Beam Physics Isotope Laboratory (ETH Zurich).

2019

While the absolute use of the Old Persian verb duruj- has not attracted the attention of scholars, the coexistence of the construction with the accusative and with the genitive(dative) has been of greater interest, even though a convincing explanation for this data has not yet been provided. Indeed, the various scholars who have considered this issue have either limited themselves to labelling the different constructions as ‘transitive’ or ‘intransitive’, without giving a detailed account for the phenomenon, or interpreted this alternation as a case of stylistic variation, without considering either the morphosyntactic level proper, or the semantic one, whether in synchrony or diachrony. This latter reading has been mainly based on information provided by the Elamite and Babylonian versions. The aim of this paper is to propose that the alternation between Nominative-Genitive(Dative) and Nominative-Accusative constructions is not a mere stylistic variation, but has a valid linguistic basis, and that the two expressions need to be considered as two different argument structure patterns. Various elements seem to lead to this interpretation, although the scarcity of Old Persian documentation in this case does not allow us to formulate a robust hypothesis – or even posit that there is just one plausible hypothesis.

The present study examined the impact of language teachers' gender, age, and experience on their self-efficacy. Moreover, it aimed to find out the mediating role of teacher education in modifying the effects of foregoing variables. To this end, a stratified sample of 180 English teachers in high schools, private language institutes, and university settings in seven cities in Iran were initially handpicked as the participants of the study. Next, Teachers' Sense of Efficacy Scale (Tschamen-Moran & Woolfolk-HoyHoy, 2001) was administered to the participants to specify their initial self-efficacy. Further, they attended a 20-session in-service teacher training program focused on theoretical and empirical issues related to learner variables and aiming at empowering the participants to tackle relevant problems in the context of the classroom. Finally, The Self-Efficacy Scale was administered to probe viable changes in the participants' self-efficacy posterior to the treatment in relation to gender, age and experience. Results showed significantly higher levels of self-efficacy for males prior to and for females after the treatment. Additionally, the findings revealed that teacher self-efficacy was positively influenced by increase in teachers' age and teaching experience and that in-service teacher training could avert disparities among the teachers across the diverse age groups and experience levels. The results underscore the paramount importance of in-service training courses aimed at empowering teachers.