Looking Ahead Old Persian proverbs say traveling tests your stamina and makes you wise. My husband and I can testify to the first part and hope that the second is as true. When we arrived at UMD in August 2012, we were lucky to be received by extremely kind and supportive colleagues. The office space and equipment had barely been arranged when the news of our first collaborative event with the National Geographic on October 19th, hit the airwaves. An Evening with Rumi celebrated the contributions of the great Iranian poet and mystic Jalal al-Din Rumi (b. 1207). The fact that it sold out gave me and Roshan Institute a warm welcome. We clearly had keen supporters even in the broader Maryland and DC community. Then it was one event after another including an exquisite three day film festival screening the hitherto unseen works of young Iranian film makers called Festival Cinema Invisible. I will not here refer to all the exciting past year events as you will read about them in this newsletter. But I must mention the crown of them all A Meeting of Two Oceans, a face-to-face conversation with His Holiness the Dalai Lama about similarities and differences between Sufism and Buddhism. The Institute owed this unique opportunity to Dr. Elahé Omidyar MirDjalali, Chair and President of Roshan Cultural Heritage Institute and our most unwavering supporter. She made the visit possible through her personal friendship with His Holiness. We will all cherish the memories of the afternoon of Tuesday, May 3rd when Roshan Institute made it possible for the UMD and the broader community to hear a personal exchange between the greatest figure in current Buddhist thought and practice and a number of distinguished scholars of Sufism.
Dr. Fatemeh Keshavarz Roshan Institute Chair in Persian Studies Director, Roshan Institute for Persian Studies
Dr. Elahé Omidyar Mir-Djalali Chair and President Roshan Cultural Heritage Institute
Beyond programing, Roshan Institute has been spreading its wings across the UMD campus in many different ways. Our goal is to make Persian Studies an integral part of the Humanistic education at UMD and beyond. An example of this is our recently announced Fellowships and Scholarships for Excellence in Persian Studies. To maintain tenacity and longevity in the field of Persian Studies is possible only through training young, talented and energetic leadership. Having received a generous gift from Roshan Cultural Heritage Institute, we are now able to do exactly that. Any UMD department in the College of Arts and Humanities that admits talented graduate students to study a topic clearly related to Persian Studies will benefit from these fellowships and scholarships. The only criterion is undisputed academic excellence. Side by side with boosting graduate education, we are developing exciting and widely appealing undergraduate courses that would attract the general student body to Persian Studies and educate them in this regard. As we speak, Professor Hooman Koliji in the School of Architecture is designing a new course on Iranian life and culture through architecture. This course, which is scheduled to be offered in spring 2015 for the first time, will provide a nice parallel to a popular course offered currently called “Iranian Life through Literature and Film.” Other ideas for new courses are being discussed which I hope to be able to report on in our future newsletters. We may not have the opportunity to host His Holiness the Dalai Lama at Roshan Institute any time soon, but we are designing rich educational programs by the day. Whether it is celebrating Iranian Women entrepreneurs with presentations, music, and food on March 9 or a new collaboration with the Library of Congress to organize a special speaker series on a millennium of Persian Bookmaking, it is for one simple and worthy goal: making Persian Studies one of the richest components of a humanistic global education.