Research and Teaching

Saeed Talajooy was born and educated in Iran and began to engage with Persian literature in his teenage years. He studied and then taught English and world literatures in English in Iranian universities and through his teaching became interested in how ideas, characters and images travel across genres, cultures and historical periods. His recent publications on reformulation of myths, folktales and indigenous performing and chivalric traditions all mark this interest, and his current research suggests the continuity of his engagement with inter-textual and inter-media journeys of ideas.

His research is on the reflections of the changing patterns of Iranian identity in Persian cultural products. It involves studying the way Persian playwrights, poets, novelists, and filmmakers refashion indigenous rituals,  artistic forms, modes of thought, historical accounts, and classical and modern literary works to recreate their ideal images of Iranian identity or adapt non-Iranian novels and plays for Iranian stage and screen. It reflects on technical, thematic, and intercultural and inter-historical adaptation as a way of promoting or resisting dominant cultural discourses. Another aspect of his research involves comparative studies of cultural resistance in Middle Eastern cultures. He has taught world drama in English and English language, literature and drama in Iran, and Persian language, literature, drama, myths, folktales, and cinema, as well as postcolonial and comparative literatures in the UK. His current research which is focused on heroism is geared towards a series of studies among which the first is entitled, Heroism and Its Others: Alternative Discourses of Heroism in the Persianate World from Antiquity to the Present (2027-28). 

His teaching includes convening honour and postgraduate modules for advanced Persian language, modern and classical Persian literature, Iranian cinema, drama and song traditions, and contributing sessions on Iranian myths, literature and history to graduate modules in Iranian Studies and undergraduate and graduate modules in comparative literature.

Research Key Terms

Modern Persian Drama, Poetry, and Fiction; Iranian Cinema; Modernity and Iranian Culture; Classical Persian Literature, particularly the epic, romance, folktale, and chivalric traditions of the Persianate world; Comparative Studies of Persian Literature and World Literature in English; Literary, Cultural, Translation, Postcolonial, Gender, Psychoanalytical, Film, and New Historicist Theories.

See also

Forum for the Cultural Studies of Iran