The SOF/Heyman Bookshelf
80 episodes - English - Latest episode: 7 months ago - ★★★★★ - 6 ratingsPodcasts from Columbia University's The Society of Fellows and Heyman Center for the Humanities, where we feature talks with professors about their recent work, publications, novels, and more. Constantine Lignos hosts. Previous seasons were hosted by Olivia Branscum and Timothy Lundy.
We also feature The Trilling Tapes. In this podcast series, we mine the recorded Trilling archives to uncover and contextualize more than forty years of exceptional critical thought.
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Episodes
Marie Myung-Ok Lee's The Evening Hero
September 11, 2023 14:54 - 32 minutes - 29.8 MBIn episode nine of the second season of the SOF/Heyman Bookshelf, host highlights Marie Myung-Ok Lee's The Evening Hero. This sweeping, lyrical novel follows a Korean immigrant pursuing the American dream who must confront the secrets of the past or risk watching the world he’s worked so hard to build come crumbling down.
Sarah Zukerman Daly's Violent Victors
September 05, 2023 21:05 - 30 minutes - 28.4 MBIn episode eight of the new season of the SOF/Heyman Bookshelf, host highlights Sarah Zukerman Daly's Violent Victors: Why Bloodstained Parties Win Postwar Elections. Proposing actionable interventions that can help to moderate these trade-offs, Violent Victors links war outcomes with democratic outcomes to shed essential new light on political life after war.
Annie Pfeifer's To The Collector Belong The Spoils
August 28, 2023 20:05 - 32 minutes - 29.9 MBIn episode seven of the new season of the SOF/Heyman Bookshelf, host highlights To the Collector Belong the Spoils: Modernism and the Art of Appropriation by Annie Pfeifer. Positing a shadow history of modernism rooted in collection, citation, and paraphrase, To the Collector Belong the Spoils traces the movement's artistic innovation to its preoccupation with appropriating and rewriting the past.
Michele M Moody-Adams's Making Space For Justice
August 21, 2023 16:01 - 29 minutes - 26.6 MBMichele M Moody-Adams's Making Space For Justice In episode six of the new season of the SOF/Heyman Bookshelf, host highlights Making Space for Justice: Social Movements, Collective Imagination, and Political Hope by Michele M Moody-Adams. With this work, Dr. Moody-Adams contends that the insights arising from social movements are critical to bridging the gap between discerning theory and effective practice—and should be transformative for political thought as well as for political activism.
Lauren Robertson's Entertaining Uncertainty In The Early Modern Theatre
August 14, 2023 13:43 - 29 minutes - 27.3 MBIn episode five of the new season of the SOF/Heyman Bookshelf, host highlights Entertaining Uncertainty in the Early Modern Theater: Stage Spectacle and Audience Response by Lauren Robertson. This original study shows that the theater of Shakespeare and his contemporaries responded to the crises of knowledge that roiled through early modern England by rendering them spectacular.
Bruce Robbins's Criticism and Politics
August 07, 2023 18:28 - 31 minutes - 29 MBIn episode four of the new season of the SOF/Heyman Bookshelf, host highlights Bruce Robbins's Criticism and Politics: A Polemical Introduction. This accessible introduction to cultural theory asks, "What is criticism for?" and presents an answer in the form of an original polemic about the purpose of criticism.
Andreas Huyssen's Memory Art in the Contemporary World
July 31, 2023 16:20 - 30 minutes - 27.9 MBIn episode three of the new season of the SOF/Heyman Bookshelf, host highlights Andreas Huyssen's Memory Art in the Contemporary World: Confronting Violence in the Global South. Andreas Huyssen deals with the ever-expanding field of transnational memory art, which has emerged from a political need to come to terms with traumatic historical pasts, from the Holocaust to apartheid, colonialism, state terror, and civil war.
Nadia Abu El-Haj's Combat Trauma
July 24, 2023 14:23 - 29 minutes - 27.4 MBIn episode two of the new season of the SOF/Heyman Bookshelf, host highlights Nadia Abu El-Haj's Combat Trauma. Nadia Abu El-Haj argues that in the American public’s imagination, the traumatized soldier stands in for destructive wars abroad, with decisive ramifications in the post-9/11 era.
Isabel Huacuja Alonso's Radio For The Millions
July 24, 2023 14:19 - 27 minutes - 25.4 MBIn episode one of the new season of the SOF/Heyman Bookshelf, host highlights Isabel Huacuja Alonso's Radio For The Millions. This stunning debut examines the history of Hindi-Urdu radio during the height of its popularity from the 1930s to the 1980s
Mae Ngai's The Chinese Question
February 06, 2023 14:44 - 27 minutes - 25 MBIn episode seven of the SOF/Heyman Bookshelf, host highlights The Chinese Question: The Gold Rushes and Global Politics by Mae M. Ngai. The Chinese Question chronicles how Chinese migration to the world’s goldfields upended global power and economics and forged modern conceptions of race.
Nicholas Bartlett's Recovering Histories
January 23, 2023 14:00 - 20 minutes - 18.8 MBIn episode six of the SOF/Heyman Bookshelf, host highlights Recovering Histories: Life and Labor after Heroin in Reform-Era China by: Nicholas Bartlett. Drawing on more than 18 months of fieldwork, Nicholas Bartlett explores how individuals’ varying experiences of heroin recovery highlight shared challenges of inhabiting China’s contested present.
Jeremy Dauber's American Comics
January 17, 2023 14:10 - 25 minutes - 35.3 MBIn episode five of the SOF/Heyman Bookshelf, host highlights American Comics: A History by Jeremy Dauber. American Comics is a rich chronicle of the last 150 years of American history through the lens of its comic strips, political cartoons, superheroes, graphic novels, and more.
Arden Hegele's Romantic Autopsy
January 09, 2023 17:59 - 30 minutes - 28.3 MBIn episode four of the SOF/Heyman Bookshelf, host highlights Romantic Autopsy: Literary Form and Medical Reading by Arden Hegele. Romantic Autopsy considers how the poetry and prose of British Romanticism was written in conversation with the field of medicine in the late 18th and early 19th centuries.
Roosevelt Montás's Rescuing Socrates
January 02, 2023 14:00 - 27 minutes - 24.8 MBIn episode three of the SOF/Heyman Bookshelf, host highlights Roosevelt Montás's Rescuing Socrates: How the Great Books Changed My Life and Why They Matter for a New Generation. Weaving together memoir and literary reflection, Rescuing Socrates describes Columbia University’s renowned Core Curriculum and how four authors had a profound impact on Montás’s life.
David Freedberg's Iconoclasm
December 26, 2022 15:00 - 25 minutes - 23.5 MBIn episode two of the new season of the SOF/Heyman Bookshelf, host highlights David Freedberg's Iconoclasm. Freedberg combines fresh thinking with deep expertise to address the renewed significance of iconoclasm, its ideologies, and its impact.
Susan Bernofsky's Clairvoyant of the Small
December 19, 2022 15:51 - 25 minutes - 23 MBIn episode one of the new season of the SOF/Heyman Bookshelf, host highlights Susan Bernofsky's Clairvoyant of the Small. In an immaculately researched and beautifully written biography, Susan Bernofsky sets Robert Walser in the context of early twentieth-century European history, establishing him as one of the most important modernist writers.
Frank Andre Guridy's The Sports Revolution: How Texas Changed the Culture of American Athletics
June 09, 2021 14:53 - 30 minutes - 41.9 MBIn the 1960s and 1970s, America experienced a sports revolution. New professional sports franchises and leagues were established, new stadiums were built, football and basketball grew in popularity, and the proliferation of television enabled people across the country to support their favorite teams and athletes from the comfort of their homes. At the same time, the civil rights and feminist movements were reshaping the nation, broadening the boundaries of social and political participation. ...
Chris Washburne's Latin Jazz: The Other Jazz
May 26, 2021 15:51 - 39 minutes - 54.3 MBJazz has always been a genre built on the blending of disparate musical cultures. Latin jazz illustrates this perhaps better than any other style in this rich tradition, yet its cultural heritage has been all but erased from narratives of jazz history. Told from the perspective of a long-time jazz insider, Latin Jazz: The Other Jazz corrects the record, providing a historical account that embraces the genre's international nature and explores the dynamic interplay of economics, race, ethnicit...
Kaiama L. Glover's A Regarded Self: Caribbean Womanhood and the Ethics of Disorderly Being
March 24, 2021 13:33 - 25 minutes - 35.7 MBHosted by Olivia Branscum and Timothy Lundy, this week's episode features Kaiama L. Glover's A Regarded Self: Caribbean Womanhood and the Ethics of Disorderly Being. In A Regarded Self Kaiama L. Glover champions unruly female protagonists who adamantly refuse the constraints of coercive communities. Reading novels by Marie Chauvet, Maryse Condé, René Depestre, Marlon James, and Jamaica Kincaid, Glover shows how these authors' women characters enact practices of freedom that privilege the sel...
Dustin Stewart's Futures of Enlightenment Poetry
March 03, 2021 17:54 - 29 minutes - 40.8 MBThis book offers a revisionist account of poetry and embodiment from Milton to Romanticism. Scholars have made much of the period's theories of matter, with some studies equating the eighteenth century's modernity with its materialism. Yet the Enlightenment in Britain also brought bold new arguments for the immateriality of spirit and evocative claims about an imminent spirit realm. Protestant religious writing was of two minds about futurity, swinging back and forth between patience for the ...
Jack Halberstam's Wild Things: The Disorder of Desire
February 17, 2021 16:12 - 35 minutes - 48.2 MBIn Wild Things Jack Halberstam offers an alternative history of sexuality by tracing the ways in which wildness has been associated with queerness and queer bodies throughout the twentieth century. Halberstam theorizes the wild as an unbounded and unpredictable space that offers sources of opposition to modernity's orderly impulses. Wildness illuminates the normative taxonomies of sexuality against which radical queer practice and politics operate. Throughout, Halberstam engages with a wide v...
Matthew Hart's Extraterritorial: A Political Geography of Contemporary Fiction
January 27, 2021 17:26 - 25 minutes - 35.7 MBThe future of fiction is neither global nor national. Instead, Matthew Hart argues, it is trending extraterritorial. Extraterritorial spaces fall outside of national borders but enhance state power. They cut across geography and history but do not point the way to a borderless new world. They range from the United Nations headquarters and international waters to CIA black sites and the departure zones at international airports. The political geography of the present, Hart shows, has come to r...
Eugenia Lean's Vernacular Industrialism in China
January 14, 2021 16:58 - 34 minutes - 46.8 MBIn early twentieth-century China, Chen Diexian (1879–1940) was a maverick entrepreneur—at once a prolific man of letters and captain of industry, a magazine editor and cosmetics magnate. He tinkered with chemistry in his private studio, used local cuttlefish to source magnesium carbonate, and published manufacturing tips in how-to columns. In a rapidly changing society, Chen copied foreign technologies and translated manufacturing processes from abroad to produce adaptations of global commodi...
Casey Blake, Daniel H. Borus, and Howard Brick's At the Center
December 16, 2020 18:42 - 39 minutes - 54.3 MBAt a time when American political and cultural leaders asserted that the nation stood at “the center of world awareness,” thinkers and artists sought to understand and secure principles that lay at the center of things. From the onset of the Cold War in 1948 through 1963, they asked: What defined the essential character of “American culture”? Could permanent moral standards guide human conduct amid the flux and horrors of history? In what ways did a stable self emerge through the life cycle? ...
Deborah Paredez's Year of the Dog
December 09, 2020 17:26 - 29 minutes - 40 MBIn the tradition of women as the unsung keepers of history, Deborah Paredez’s second poetry collection tells her story as a Latina daughter of the Vietnam War. The title refers to the year 1970—the Year of the Metal Dog in the lunar calendar—which was the year of the author’s birth, the year her father prepared to deploy to Vietnam along with many other Mexican-American immigrant soldiers, and a year of tremendous upheaval across the United States. Images from iconic photographs and her fathe...
Elleni Centime Zeleke's Ethiopia in Theory: Revolution and Knowledge Production, 1964-2016
December 02, 2020 17:53 - 36 minutes - 50.3 MBBetween the years 1964 and 1974, Ethiopian post-secondary students studying at home, in Europe, and in North America produced a number of journals where they explored the relationship between social theory and social change within the project of building a socialist Ethiopia. Ethiopia in Theory examines the literature of this student movement, together with the movement’s afterlife in Ethiopian politics and society in order to ask: what does it mean to write today about the appropriation and ...
Maggie Cao's The End of Landscape in Nineteenth-Century America
October 21, 2020 16:02 - 20 minutes - 18.5 MBNew Books at the Heyman Center: a podcast featuring audio from events at Columbia University, and interviews with the speakers and authors. The End of Landscape in Nineteenth-Century America examines the dissolution of landscape painting in the late nineteenth-century United States. Maggie M. Cao explores the pictorial practices that challenged, mourned, or revised the conventions of landscape painting, a major cultural project for nineteenth-century Americans. Through rich analysis of artwo...
Adam Tooze's Crashed: How a Decade of Financial Crises Changed the World
October 14, 2020 18:27 - 29 minutes - 40.4 MBNew Books at the Heyman Center: a podcast featuring audio from events at Columbia University, and interviews with the speakers and authors. From a prizewinning economic historian, an eye-opening reinterpretation of the 2008 economic crisis (and its ten-year aftermath) as a global event that directly led to the shockwaves being felt around the world today. In September 2008 President George Bush could still describe the financial crisis as an incident local to Wall Street. In fact it was a d...
Wael Hallaq's Restating Orientalism: A Critique of Modern Knowledge
October 07, 2020 17:11 - 24 minutes - 33.4 MBNew Books at SOF/Heyman: a podcast featuring audio from events at Columbia University, and interviews with the speakers and authors. In this landmark theoretical investigation, Wael B. Hallaq reevaluates and deepens the critique of Orientalism in order to deploy it for rethinking the foundations of the modern project. Refusing to isolate or scapegoat Orientalism, Restating Orientalism extends the critique to other fields, from law, philosophy, and scientific inquiry to core ideas of academic...
Adam Reich and Peter Bearman's Working for Respect: Community and Conflict at Walmart
September 30, 2020 18:17 - 27 minutes - 25.3 MBNew Books at SOF/Heyman: a podcast featuring audio from events at Columbia University, and interviews with the speakers and authors. Walmart is the largest employer in the world. It encompasses nearly 1 percent of the entire American workforce—young adults, parents, formerly incarcerated people, retirees. Walmart also presents one possible future of work—Walmartism—in which the arbitrary authority of managers mixes with a hyperrationalized, centrally controlled bureaucracy in ways that curta...
Claudio Lomnitz's Nuestra América: utopía y persistencia de una familia judía
September 23, 2020 17:57 - 36 minutes - 49.7 MBNew Books at SOF/Heyman: a podcast featuring audio from events at Columbia University, and interviews with the speakers and authors. Claudio Lomnitz's most recent book, Nuestra América, is an essay on the story of his maternal grandparents-- and to some degree the story of his father. It starts with a shipwreck, a story of language loss. A reflection on why he lacks four of the languages that would have been of great use to properly write this book. And it works from that low point toward...
Maria Victoria Murillo & Ernesto Calvo's Non-Policy Politics
September 16, 2020 19:16 - 26 minutes - 24.2 MBNew Books at SOF/Heyman: a podcast featuring audio from events at Columbia University, and interviews with the speakers and authors. Calvo and Murillo consider the non-policy benefits that voters consider when deciding their vote. While parties advertise policies, they also deliver non-policy benefits in the form of competent economic management, constituency service, and patronage jobs. Different from much of the existing research, which focuses on the implementation of policy or on the del...
Will Slauter's Who Owns the News: A History of Copyright
September 09, 2020 18:06 - 40 minutes - 37.5 MBNew Books at SOF/Heyman: a podcast featuring audio from events at Columbia University, and interviews with the speakers and authors. You can't copyright facts, but is news a category unto itself? Without legal protection for the "ownership" of news, what incentive does a news organization have to invest in producing quality journalism that serves the public good? This book explores the intertwined histories of journalism and copyright law in the United States and Great Britain, revealing how...
Ilana Feldman's Life Lived in Relief: Humanitarian Predicaments and Palestinian Refugee Politics
September 02, 2020 18:34 - 23 minutes - 21.6 MBNew Books at SOF/Heyman: a podcast featuring audio from events at Columbia University, and interviews with the speakers and authors. Palestinian refugees’ experience of protracted displacement is among the lengthiest in history. In her breathtaking new book, Ilana Feldman explores this community’s engagement with humanitarian assistance over a seventy-year period and their persistent efforts to alter their present and future conditions. Based on extensive archival and ethnographic field rese...
Murad Idris' War for Peace: Genealogies of a Violent Ideal in Western and Islamic Thought
September 02, 2020 18:31 - 18 minutes - 26 MBNew Books at SOF/Heyman: a podcast featuring audio from events at Columbia University, and interviews with the speakers and authors. Peace is a universal ideal, but its political life is a great paradox: "peace" is the opposite of war, but it also enables war. If peace is the elimination of war, then what does it mean to wage war for the sake of peace? What does peace mean when some say that they are committed to it but that their enemies do not value it? Why is it that associating peace wit...
Gil Eyal's The Crisis of Expertise
August 26, 2020 18:27 - 27 minutes - 25.1 MBNew Books at SOF/Heyman: a podcast featuring audio from events at Columbia University, and interviews with the speakers and authors. In recent political debates there has been a significant change in the valence of the word “experts” from a superlative to a near pejorative, typically accompanied by a recitation of experts’ many failures and misdeeds. In topics as varied as Brexit, climate change and vaccinations there is a palpable mistrust of experts and a tendency to dismiss their advice. ...
Mariusz Kozak's Enacting Musical Time: The Bodily Experience of New Music
August 19, 2020 19:53 - 26 minutes - 23.9 MBNew Books at SOF/Heyman: a podcast featuring audio from events at Columbia University, and interviews with the speakers and authors. What is musical time? Where is it manifested? How does it enter into our experience, and how do we capture it in our analyses? A compelling approach among works on temporality, phenomenology, and the ecologies of the new sound worlds, Enacting Musical Time argues that musical time is itself the site of the interaction between musical sounds and a situated, embo...
Jennifer Wenzel's The Disposition of Nature: Environmental Crisis and World Literature
June 18, 2020 17:59 - 27 minutes - 37.4 MBNew Books at SOF/Heyman: a podcast featuring audio from events at Columbia University, and interviews with the speakers and authors. How do literature and other cultural forms shape how we imagine the planet, for better or worse? In this rich, original, and long awaited book, Jennifer Wenzel tackles the formal innovations, rhetorical appeals, and sociological imbrications of world literature that might help us confront unevenly distributed environmental crises, including global warming.The D...
Stephanie McCurry's Women’s War: Fighting and Surviving the American Civil War
June 12, 2020 15:48 - 26 minutes - 36.6 MBNew Books at SOF/Heyman: a podcast featuring audio from events at Columbia University, and interviews with the speakers and authors. When the war broke out, Union soldiers assumed Confederate women would be innocent noncombatants. Experience soon challenged this simplistic belief. Through a trio of dramatic stories, Stephanie McCurry reveals the vital and sometimes confounding roles women played on and off the battlefield. We meet Clara Judd, a Confederate spy whose imprisonment for treason ...
Marianne Hirsch & Leo Spitzer's School Photos in Liquid Time: Reframing Difference
June 05, 2020 15:45 - 29 minutes - 40.6 MBNew Books at SOF/Heyman: a podcast featuring audio from events at Columbia University, and interviews with the speakers and authors. From clandestine images of Jewish children isolated in Nazi ghettos and Japanese American children incarcerated in camps to images of Native children removed to North American boarding schools, classroom photographs of schoolchildren are pervasive even in repressive historical and political contexts. School Photos in Liquid Time offers a closer look at this gen...
Sarah Cole's Inventing Tomorrow: H. G. Wells and the Twentieth Century
May 29, 2020 15:26 - 34 minutes - 47.4 MBNew Books at SOF/Heyman: a podcast featuring audio from events at Columbia University, and interviews with the speakers and authors. In Inventing Tomorrow, Sarah Cole provides a definitive account of Wells’s work and ideas. She contends that Wells casts new light on modernism and its values: on topics from warfare to science to time, his work resonates both thematically and aesthetically with some of the most ambitious modernists. At the same time, unlike many modernists, Wells believed that...
Brendan O'Flaherty and Rajiv Sethi's Shadows of Doubt: Stereotypes, Crime, & the Pursuit of Justice
May 22, 2020 14:49 - 20 minutes - 28.7 MBNew Books at SOF/Heyman: a podcast featuring audio from events at Columbia University, and interviews with the speakers and authors. Shadows of Doubt reveals how deeply stereotypes distort our interactions, shape crime, and deform the criminal justice system. If you’re a robber, how do you choose your victims? As a police officer, how afraid are you of the young man you’re about to arrest? As a judge, do you think the suspect in front of you will show up in court if released from pretrial de...
Sharon Marcus' The Drama of Celebrity
May 15, 2020 16:08 - 23 minutes - 32.3 MBNew Books at SOF/Heyman: a podcast featuring audio from events at Columbia University, and interviews with the speakers and authors. In this fascinating and deeply researched book, Sharon Marcus challenges everything you thought you knew about our obsession with fame. Icons are not merely famous for being famous; the media alone cannot make or break stars; fans are not simply passive dupes. Instead, journalists, the public, and celebrities themselves all compete, passionately and expertly, t...
Stathis Gourgouris' The Perils of the One
May 08, 2020 16:53 - 28 minutes - 38.7 MBNew Books at SOF/Heyman: a podcast featuring audio from events at Columbia University, and interviews with the speakers and authors. In The Perils of the One, Stathis Gourgouris offers a philosophical anthropology that confronts the legacy of “monarchical thinking”: the desire to subjugate oneself to unitary principles and structures, whether political, moral, theological, or secular. In wide-ranging essays that are at once poetic and polemical, intellectual and passionate, Gourgouris reads ...
Nara B. Milanich's Paternity: The Elusive Quest for the Father
May 01, 2020 16:10 - 43 minutes - 59.2 MBNew Books at SOF/Heyman: a podcast featuring audio from events at Columbia University, and interviews with the speakers and authors. The new science of paternity, with methods such as blood typing, fingerprinting, and facial analysis, would bring clarity to the conundrum of fatherhood—or so it appeared. Suddenly, it would be possible to establish family relationships, expose adulterous affairs, locate errant fathers, unravel baby mix-ups, and discover one’s true race and ethnicity. Tracing t...
James Zetzel's Critics, Compilers, and Commentators: An Introduction to Roman Philology
September 04, 2019 16:38 - 50 minutes - 105 MBNew Books at the Heyman Center: a podcast featuring audio from events at Columbia University, and interviews with the speakers and authors. "To teach correct Latin and to explain the poets" were the two standard duties of Roman teachers. Not only was a command of literary Latin a prerequisite for political and social advancement, but a sense of Latin's history and importance contributed to the Romans' understanding of their own cultural identity. Put plainly, philology-the study of language ...
Nico Baumbach's Cinema/Politics/Philosophy
September 04, 2019 16:33 - 39 minutes - 75.4 MBNew Books at the Heyman Center: a podcast featuring audio from events at Columbia University, and interviews with the speakers and authors. Almost fifty years ago, Jean-Louis Comolli and Jean Narboni published the manifesto “Cinema/Ideology/Criticism,” helping to set the agenda for a generation of film theory that used cinema as a means of critiquing capitalist ideology. In recent decades, film studies has moved away from politicized theory, abandoning the productive ways in which theory und...
Pier Mattia Tommasino's The Venetian Qur'an: A Renaissance Companion to Islam
August 07, 2019 17:01 - 21 minutes - 41.7 MBNew Books at the Heyman Center: a podcast featuring audio from events at Columbia University, and interviews with the speakers and authors. An anonymous book appeared in Venice in 1547 titled L'Alcorano di Macometto, and, according to the title page, it contained "the doctrine, life, customs, and laws [of Mohammed] . . . newly translated from Arabic into the Italian language." Were this true, L'Alcorano di Macometto would have been the first printed direct translation of the Qur'an in a Euro...
Konstantina Zanou's Transnational Patriotism in the Mediterranean, 1800-1850
July 24, 2019 15:58 - 19 minutes - 36.6 MBNew Books at the Heyman Center: a podcast featuring audio from events at Columbia University, and interviews with the speakers and authors. Transnational Patriotism in the Mediterranean investigates the long process of transition from a world of empires to a world of nation-states by narrating the biographies of a group of people who were born within empires but came of age surrounded by the emerging vocabulary of nationalism, much of which they themselves created. It is the story of a gen...
Hamid Dabashi's The Shahnameh: The Persian Epic as World Literature
July 10, 2019 15:50 - 32 minutes - 59.9 MBNew Books at the Heyman Center: a podcast featuring audio from events at Columbia University, and interviews with the speakers and authors. The Shahnameh: The Persian Epic as World Literature By: Hamid Dabashi The Shahnameh, an epic poem recounting the foundation of Iran across mythical, heroic, and historical ages, is the beating heart of Persian literature and culture. Composed by Abu al-Qasem Ferdowsi over a thirty-year period and completed in the year 1010, the epic has entertained gene...