Azar Nafisi

This week, our guest is author and academic Azar Nafisi. Her books include Reading Lolita in Tehran and Things I’ve Been Silent About. Nafisi was born in Iran, and first came to the United States to study in the 1970s. After earning her Ph.D., she returned to her home country to teach at the University of Tehran, where in 1981, she was expelled for refusing to wear the mandatory Islamic veil. Nafisi went back to teaching six years later, with a series of lectures that examined the role of Western literature and culture in Iran after the 1979 revolution. She returned to the United States in 1997 to advocate on behalf of Iran’s intellectuals, youth, and especially young women. Her new book Read Dangerously: The Subversive Power of Literature in Troubled Times examines some of the most probing questions of our time through the works of Toni Morrison, Salman Rushdie, James Baldwin, and more. On March 31, 2022, Azar Nafisi talked to Steven Winn at the studios of KQED in San Francisco.