Throughout history, many an ambitious diplomatic initiative has slipped into obscurity, but few have been so thoroughly forgotten as the efforts of...

In the interests of exploiting Iran’s location and natural resources to launch a projected attack on British India, Napoleon sent a delegation of m...

Shahrokh Meskoob was an Iranian writer and intellectual, who was born in Babol, on the Caspian coast, in 1924 and died in Paris in 2005. Imprisoned...

Agriculture was the mainstay of Iran's economy in the nineteenth century, yet little is known about it. Historians have rarely taken that important...

This book is part of a series of Iranian Studies publications made possible by the Hamid and Christina Moghadam Program in Iranian Studies at Stanf...

In 1770, Astrakhan, on the left bank of the Volga River close to where it discharges into the Caspian Sea, was Russia's most important southern por...

Until now, only a sparse selection of Golshiri's fiction has been available in English translation -- three short stories, a novella written under ...

Poet and translator Dick Davis brings together a collection of epigrams by poets from the 'classic' period of Persian literature. It makes a fascin...

This is a record of Iran's eternal landscape of the past and a retrospective of an important Iranian artist. Ardeshir Mohassess is an artist of the...

After five years of overcoming obstacles, meticulous planning, and ten thousand miles of traveling the length and breadth of Iran cooking with loca...

The life of Taj al-Saltana, daughter of the ruler of Iran, Naser al-Din Shah Qajar, epitomized the predicaments of her changing era. Overcoming her...

These stories not only portray, with incomparable perception, humour, and compassion, women from the various strata of Iranian society, but they al...

"Diary of a Tree" is a poem in two books from the point of view of a tree. Born in Tehran, Iran in 1944, Goli Khalatbary followed her father throug...

Some of the most fascinating human epochs lie in the borderlands between history and mystery. So it is with the life of Cyrus the Great, founder of...

One of the most important sources on the history and culture of seventeenth-century Iran, Engelbert Kaempfer’s Amoenitatum Exoticarum was first pub...

Iran's national epic, the Shahnameh of Ferdowsi, has traditionally been regarded by both Persians and Westerners as a poem celebrating the central ...

Obeyd-e Zakani, who died in 1372 is among the great poets of Iran but little known in the West. This selection of his work is the first to be trans...

This bilingual edition of Faces of Love: Hafez and the Poets of Shiraz has the original Persian verses facing the English translations. The three S...

This book examines the close and volatile relationship between a highly popular art form, the production of culture and the politics of power in so...

Until recent times, Iran regularly had to cope with local or national famines. The various governments, until the second decade of the twentieth ce...

Forugh Farrokhzad was born in Tehran in 1935 and died in a car crash at the age of 32. During her short, tumultuous life she was married and divorc...

All memoirs bring the past into the present, but only a few manage to illuminate both simultaneously. This a quietly insightful masterpiece of reme...

If what follows can smooth the path of any pupil or teacher in the difficult and arduous task of clambering out of the pit that we have dug for our...

This is a study of the history, development, and change in the games played in Iran. Iranians, young and old, rich and poor, male and female, playe...

When Terence O'Donnell, an American who lived in Iran for fifteen years in the 1960s and 1970s, was asked what he was doing there, he replied, "The...

When Terence O'Donnell, an American who lived in Iran for fifteen years in the 1960s and 1970s, was asked what he was doing there, he replied, "The...

For this book, Willem Floor has selected and translated into English thirteen German sources reporting on events in Iran from 1580 to 1722. One of ...

Merchants and bankers managed much of nineteenth-century Iran's economy and finances. The ulama -- clerical leaders -- who considered themselves re...

Nowruz -- the Persian New Year -- is one of the world's great festivals, a full month of activities celebrating the earth, the arrival of spring, a...

This book offers a fascinating portrait of the Caucasus at the dawn of the modern era. Written in Persian and completed in 1845, it offered the fir...

Given the importance of bread in the Iranian diet, it is surprising that its role in Iranian society has so far been ignored as a subject of study....

Aplace for the sick (bimarestan) had existed in Iran since the mid-sixth century, but such institutions never developed into real hospitals, except...

The Chinese invented papermaking, which by the 8th century had reached the Muslim world in Samarkand and Baghdad, and Spain by the 11th century. Mu...

Although most people do not speak of theatre and Iran in the same breath, dramatic expression has always been a fixture of Iranian culture. In trad...

The story of Rostam and Esfandiyar is one of the most moving tragedies in Ferdowsis epic Shahnameh. In this story, Esfandiyar, the designated heir ...

C J Wills was an English physician who travelled widely in Iran from 1866-81 while working for the Indo-European Telegraph Department. With a disce...