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Iranian studies

Welcome سلام. خوش آمدید! This guide focuses on useful sources for the study of classical and contemporary Iranian studies. It is tailored to the courses offered by the McGill Institute of Islamic Studies.

Encyclopedias

Journals

  • Cultural Anthropology is the peer-reviewed journal of the Society for Cultural Anthropology (SCA), a section of the American Anthropological Association.
  • Anthropology of the Middle East is a peer-reviewed journal providing a forum for scholarly exchange between anthropologists and other social scientists working in and on the Middle East. The journal's aim is to disseminate, on the basis of informed analysis and insight, a better understanding of Middle Eastern cultures.
  • Iranian studies: bulletin of the Society for Iranian Cultural and Social Studies is a peer-reviewed journal devoted to Iranian and Persian history, literature, and society covering all areas of the world with a Persian or Iranian legacy, especially Iran, Afghanistan, Central Asia and the Caucasus, and northern India, and Iranians in the diaspora.
  • Visual Anthropology is a scholarly journal presenting original articles, commentary, discussions, and film and book reviews on anthropological and ethnographic topics. The journal focuses on the study of human behavior through visual means. Experts in the field also examine visual symbolic forms from a cultural-historical framework and provide a cross-cultural study of art and artifacts.

Databases

Ajam Media Collective is an online space devoted to documenting and analyzing cultural, social, and political trends in the diverse Iranian, Central Asian, and Diaspora communities. It serves as a semi-scholarly resource by engaging with academics, activists, and students of the region and providing access to contemporary debates and research in literature, gender studies cinema, urban geography and beyond.

CAIS - The Circle of Ancient Iranian Studies makes available articles on the anthropology and genealogy of Iranian people.

Iranian Institute of Anthropology and Culture (IIAC)'s main objective is to expand public and specialized domains of culture in all Iranian and non-Iranian cultures in Persian language.

Iranologie.com is meant to be a comprehensive site to provide information about Iranian history and culture written by Khodadad Rezakhani, a scholar of late antiquity and the early medieval period, mostly in West and Central Asia.

Podcasts

New Books Network: Iranian Studies is a consortium of author-interview podcast channels dedicated to making the viewpoints of authors available to the public. Their Iranian Studies podcast features over 100 episodes of interviews with scholars of Iran about their new books.

Primary Sources

Gale Primary Sources database includes numerous archival collections (Archives Unbound) such as:

The Endangered Archives Programme is made available by the British Library seeks to preserve cultural heritage and make it available to as wide an audience as possible. They provide grants to applicants to digitize and document archives. The material can date from any time before the middle of the 20th century, though archives that cross over to some extent into the second half of the 20th century may be accepted if the majority of the material is earlier.

Library of Congress: Persian Language Rare Materials includes Persian manuscripts and lithographic books procured for the Library of Congress in the 1930s by Kirkor Minassian (1874-1944), a renowned dealer in fine Islamic and Near Eastern arts with establishments both in New York and Paris. A number of the illuminated books are multilingual works, which include Arabic and Turkish passages in addition to Persian, focusing on scientific, religious - philosophical and literary topics, and others are holy books important to all confessional traditions within the Islamic world.

Librarian

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