AWARDS
American Association of Teachers of Persian (AATP) has set out, since 2008, to recognize those remarkable individuals who have dedicated their lives to the promotion and instruction of Persian language, culture and literature in the United States of America.
2024 AATP LIFETIME ACHIEVEMENT AWARD
Dr. Latifeh Hagigi
Dr. Latifeh Hagigi is Professor Emerita at UCLA, in the Iranian Studies Program of the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Cultures. For over thirty years, she has taught all levels of Persian language and developed curricula that focus on first-time learners and Persian heritage learners. A consistent cornerstone of her teaching has been to encourage student learning through community involvement and service, which not only imparts to her students a deeper love of Persian language and culture, but also contributes to building and strengthening the links between UCLA and the broader Persian-speaking community in Los Angeles. Latifeh’s devotion to teaching and its craft have garnered numerous awards and recognition, and in 2011 she became the
first faculty member of the Iranian Studies Program to be honored with the prestigious UCLA Academic Senate Distinguished Teaching Award. She is co-author with Professor Emeritus Mehdi Marashi of several textbooks on teaching Persian language and grammar. Her most recent publication is an article co-authored with Dr. Michelle Quay on Persian pedagogy and published in The Routledge Handbook of Second Language Acquisition and Pedagogy of Persian, edited by Dr. Pouneh Shabani-Jadidi. Latifeh has continued to pursue her own scholarship including publications on Qajar era history. Her contributions to pedagogy as a longtime member of the American Association of Teachers of Persian were recognized in 2024 with our Lifetime Achievement Award. She received her BS in Economics from the National University of Iran (Daneshgah-e Melli) in 1974 and earned her Master’s in Iranian studies and her PhD in Middle East Studies–History at the University of Utah.
2023 AATP LIFETIME ACHIEVEMENT AWARD
Dr. Mehdi Khorrami
Dr. Mohammad Mehdi Khorrami, Professor Emeritus of Persian language and literature at NYU’s Department of Middle Eastern Studies, earned his Ph.D. in French Literature from the University of Texas at Austin in 1996. His research focuses on Modern Persian fiction, stylistics, aesthetics, and sensory language. A founder and co-director of the Association for the Study of Persian Literature, his contributions to Persian studies, contemporary fiction, and Iranian Studies are vast.
Notably, Dr. Khorrami has significantly advanced Persian language education. He authored one of the most widely used Persian textbooks and readers, and has led national language assessment and curriculum development initiatives. He also played a key role in teacher training workshops for Persian and Tajiki instructors both in the U.S. and in Tajikistan. Recipient of numerous teaching awards, including NYU’s Outstanding Teaching Award
(1998) and the Golden Dozen Award (2003 and 2009), Dr. Khorrami has been an influential figure in Persian language education. He served as the first president of the Association of Teachers of Persian (2002–2006) and has been on the Board of Directors of the Eastern Consortium for Persian and Turkish since 1997. In honor of his many achievements and services, Dr. Khorrami was the recipient of our Lifetime Achievement Award at the MESA Conference in 2023.
2022 AATP LIFETIME ACHIEVEMENT AWARD
Dr. Jaleh Pirnazar
AATP had the honor of celebrating Dr. Jaleh Pirnazar as the recipient of our Lifetime Achievement Award at the 2022 MESA Conference in Denver, Colorado. Dr. Pirnazar was Senior Lecturer in Iranian Studies, Persian Language Coordinator, and Senior Research Scholar at the University of California, Berkeley, where she taught from 1970 to 2020.
She received her Ph.D. in Middle Eastern Studies and Persian Literature from this same institution in 1984. Dr. Pirnazar taught elementary and intermediate-level Persian language courses to both heritage and nonheritage
students, as well as classes on Modern Persian Literature, Classical Persian Literature, and Iranian Film and Fiction. Dr. Pirnazar began teaching Persian in the United States at a time when Persian language teaching resources were quite limited and, as a result, Persian language instructors had to rely much more on their own self-made teaching materials. She, likewise, experienced first-hand the major shift that took place in the Persian language classroom make-up in the 1990s and early 2000s, when larger numbers of heritage learners
began populating Persian classes. Dr. Pirnazar was at the helm of Persian language pedagogy to heritage students at the university level by creating teaching materials geared specifically towards heritage
students and classes, which would better suit these students’ unique needs. As a result, she garnered heritage students’ interest in the acquisition of their mother tongue and their engagement with their culture of origin. Dr. Pirnazar has published on Persian language pedagogy, Persian literature, the Iranian Jewish community, and
Iranian cinema in a variety of academic journals and edited volumes, such as: “The Literary Review,” “Iran Nameh,” and “Film and Society.” We are so pleased to have had the opportunity to honor such an important figure, colleague, and mentor in the AATP community and we look forward to continuing to benefit from Dr. Pirnazar’s knowledge in the many years to come.
2021 AATP LIFETIME ACHIEVEMENT AWARD
Dr. Mohammad Reza Ghanoonparvar
Dr. M.R. Ghanoonparvar is Professor Emeritus of Persian and Comparative
Literature at The University of Texas at Austin. Professor Ghanoonparvar has also taught at the University of Isfahan, the University of Virginia, and the University of Arizona, and was a Rockefeller Fellow at the University of Michigan. He has published widely on Persian literature and culture in both English and Persian and is the author of Prophets of Doom: Literature as a Socio-Political Phenomenon in Modern Iran (1984), In a Persian Mirror: Images of the West and Westerners in Iranian Fiction (1993), Translating the Garden (2001), Reading Chubak (2005), Persian Cuisine: Traditional, Regional and Modern Foods (2006), Iranian Film and Persian Fiction (2016), Dining at the Safavid Court (2016), and From Prophets of Doom to Chroniclers of Gloom (2021). His translations include Jalal Al-e Ahmad’s By the Pen, Sadeq Chubak’s The Patient Stone, Simin Daneshvar’s Savushun, Ahmad Kasravi’s On Islam and Shi’ism, Sadeq Hedayat’s The Myth of Creation, Nima Yushij’s The Neighbor Says: Letters of Nima Yushij and the Philosophy of Modern Persian Poetry, Davud Ghaffarzadegan’s Fortune Told in Blood, Mohammad Reza Bayrami’s The Tales of Sabalan and Eagles of Hill 60, and Bahram Beyza’i’s Memoirs of the Actor in a Supporting Role. His edited volumes include Iranian Drama: An Anthology, In Transition: Essays on Culture and Identity in Middle Eastern Societies, Gholamhoseyn Sa’edi’s Othello in Wonderland and Mirror-Polishing Storytellers, and Moniro Ravanipour’s Satan Stones and Kanizu. His most recent translations include Shahrokh Meskub’s In the Alley of the Friend and Leaving, Staying, Returning, Hushang Golshiri’s Book of Jinn, Moniro Ravanipour’s The Drowned and These Crazy Nights, Hamid Shokat’s Flight into Darkness: A Political Biography of Shapour Bakhtiar and Caught in the Crossfire: A Political Biography of Qavamossaltaneh, Ghazaleh Alizadeh’s The Nights of Tehran, Ruhangiz Sharifian’s The Last Dream and Doran, and Shahrnush Parsipur’s Blue Logos. He was the recipient of the 2008 Lois Roth Prize for Literary Translation. His forthcoming books are Swan Songs: On Diseases, Death and Dying in Persian Stories and Iranian Cities in Persian Fiction. His forthcoming translations include Ghazaleh Alizadeh’s The House of the Edrisis and Two Views, and Reza Julai’s Jujube Blossoms.
2019 AATP LIFETIME ACHIEVEMENT AWARD
Professor John Perry
MESA Conference, New Orleans
AATP was honored to present the 2019 AATP Lifetime Achievement Award to Professor John Perry. Prof. Perry is Emeritus Professor of Persian at the University of Chicago, where he taught from 1972 to 2007. Prof. Perry was born in Britain and educated at Cambridge University (Pembroke College), where in 1970 he was awarded a Ph.D in Oriental Studies (Arabic and Persian) under the tutelage of the great luminaries Peter Avery and C.E. Bosworth. During summer vacations he hitchhiked to Egypt and Iran, and in 1964-65 spent a year studying Persian at Tehran University. He has conducted research in Iran, Iraq (including Kurdistan), Afghanistan, Pakistan, India and Tajikistan, and traveled the Karakoram Highway to Kashgar. He taught in the Arabic Studies Department at St. Andrews University, Scotland (1968 - 1972) before going to Chicago. His teaching at Chicago has included courses on Middle Eastern literature in translation and Islamic Civilization as well as Persian (and Tajik) language and literature. His earlier research focused on the history of eighteenth-century Iran and adjacent regions. He concentrates currently on the history of the Persian language, and in particular the mechanisms of the incorporation of Arabic vocabulary into Persian and its dissemination into other languages of the region. Other interests of Prof Perry include Iranian folklore and vernacular culture, and the language and cultural history of Tajikistan.
2015 AATP LIFETIME ACHIEVEMENT AWARD
Mahvash Shahegh was the 2015 recipient of the AATP Award. She holds a Ph.D. in Persian language and literature from Tehran University, a B.A. in English language and literature, and an M.A. in library science from the University of Maryland at College Park. (UMCP) She has taught Persian at Johns Hopkins University and other higher educational institutions for over 30 years. She has published several books: Haiku in Four Seasons and The Structure of Sentences in Persian, both of which were published in Iran. One of her recent published works is a two-volume book on Persian language, – Learning Persian – which has been taught in several American universities and was published in America. Her latest work is a children’s story based on the Shahnameh, titled The Green Musician. It was published in August 2015 by Wisdom Tales, an American publishing company.
In addition to books, she has published numerous articles and reviews in various journals (IranShenasi, Iran-Nameh, The Middle East) in the USA; also, she is a regular contributor to the Iranian online journals, writing about many aspects of both historical and contemporary Persian language and culture. As well as being an educator and researcher, Dr. Shahegh is also a writer, essayist, and translator. In her spare time she translates poetry. She has translated many Persian poems, such as the works of seminal poets like Ahmad Shamlu, Sohrab Sepehri, Mehdi Akhavan Sales, and many others. Mahvash has served as the first executive secretary of the American Association of Teachers of Persian for almost a decade. Her fields of interest include Persian poetry, Persian grammar, Iranian religions, literary criticism, and comparative literature.
2014 AATP LIFETIME ACHIEVEMENT AWARD
Don Stilo (Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology) received the 2014 AATP lifetime achievement award. A distinguished linguist and scholar, Dr. Stilo has dedicated over five decades of his life to studying, documenting and teaching the vast body of Iranian languages. His pioneering work in the dialectology of the Iranian language family has shaped both fieldwork and theoretical linguistics for generations of scholars to come. In addition to publishing numerous studies on languages spoken in and around Iran, languages including Persian, Vafsi, Armenian, Azerbaijani, Gilaki, Aramaic, and many others, Dr. Stilo also published the two volume textbook Modern Persian, Spoken and Written (Yale University Press 2004) with Kamran Talattof and Jerome Clinton. Dr. Stilo’s teaching and research career spans institutions including Georgetown University, UCLA, The City University of New York, The University of Washington, the Academy of Sciences of Göttingen, Germany, and, most recently, the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology. He holds a PhD in linguistics from the University of Michigan (1971) with a concentration on Iranian languages. Since his retirement in 2011, Dr. Stilo has lived in the Netherlands, where he continues to write and publish on Iranian and Turkic linguistics.
At the 48th annual Middle East Studies Association (MESA) conference held in Washington, D.C. on November 22, 2014, the American Association of Teachers of Persian (AATP) honored Don Stilo for his many decades of service to the fields of Persian and Iranian languages. A renowned polyglot, dancer, and singer, Don Stilo wowed the AATP members with his powerful voice by singing folk songs in Persian and Turkish.
For video from the award ceremony, click here.
