05/07/2019
Between April 27th and May 2nd 2019, I and Prof. A. Montazerolghaem (Director of the Safavid Studies Center, University of Isfahan) organized an international masterclass on “Shiism, Death and Funerary Material Religion: cemeteries, tombstones and burial ceremonies” with the participation of scholars from the United States, the United Kingdom, Denmark and Germany, and also Ph.D. and M.A. students from Iranian universities. During the six days of the program, twenty participants visited more than twenty historical, religious and sacred sites of Abrahamic religions (Islam, Christianity and Judaism) inside and outside the city of Isfahan, situated between the provinces of Isfahan and Chaharmahal-Bakhtiari. The program was supported by the Faculty of Literature and Human Science of the University of Isfahan. The entire program was the result of a Memorandum of Understanding between the Iranian and Persian Gulf Studies (IPGS) program of the School of Global Studies and Partnership of Oklahoma State University and the University of Isfahan, which I arranged to be signed two years ago.
Forty years after the Iranian Revolution of 1978-79, this masterclass should be considered the first ever international and interdisciplinary program in which Western scholars officially visited Iran to work in the field on the topic of “Death and Dying” in a comparative perspective. Sites visited included Muslim and Jewish shrines of saints; Muslim, Christian, and Jewish cemeteries; churches, mosques, synagogues, and many other sacred sites within urban, rural and nomadic zones covering material religion from the 2nd century AD to the 2019 shrine of unknown martyrs of the Iran-Iraq War (1980-88).
This program also gave this opportunity to Iranian students to share their ideas with the Western scholars and participate side by side in all details of the program. The academic exchange between these two groups was also one of the most important goals of this program, which will result in future collaborations between all participants.
All the activities of this program in their entirety were captured by professional documentarists for use in the production of a documentary film in the name of both parties, the School of Global Studies and Partnerships of Oklahoma State University, and the Faculty of Literature and Human Science of the University of Isfahan.
