Dr Saeed Talajooy

Dr Saeed Talajooy

Senior Lecturer

Researcher profile

Phone
+44 (0)1334 46 3563
Email
st83@st-andrews.ac.uk
Office
Room 121
Location
Buchanan
Office hours
Monday 10-12

 

Research areas

Research and Teaching

Research areas

Saeed Talajooy was born and educated in Iran and began to engage with Persian literature and Iranian myths and folktales 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 and rituals.

His research is on the reflections of the changing patterns of Iranian identity in Persian cultural products. It involves studying the way Iranian playwrights, poets, novelists, artists 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 myths, 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 conflicting discourses of heroism and emancipation in Iran is geared towards a series of studies among which the first is entitled, Heroism and Its Others: Alternative Discourses of Heroism and Emancipation in Iran (2030). 

Teaching

His teaching includes convening honour and postgraduate modules for advanced Persian language, Modern Poetry and Fiction, Classical Persian Literature, Iranian Cinema, Iranian Drama, and Iranian Song Traditions. He also contributes sessions on Iranian myths, literature and history to graduate modules in Iranian Studies and undergraduate and graduate modules in comparative literature.

Research Key Terms

Iranian Myths and Folktales; Alternative Discourses of Heroism and Emancipation; Modern Persian Drama, Poetry, and Fiction; Iranian Cinema and visual arts; 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; Sociological, Psychoanalytical, Archetypal, Film, New Historicist and Gender Theories.

See also

Forum for the Cultural Studies of Iran

PhD supervision

  • Maryam Bagheri
  • Behzad Lotfi
  • Casper Sanderson

Selected publications

 

See more publications