Please join us for the Daryabari Lecture with Professor Austin O'Malley on Thursday, April 18, 2024 at the Andrews Conference Room (Social Science and Humanities Building Room 2203) from 4:30-6:00pm. Light refreshments will be provided!

The Poetics of Spiritual Instruction: Farid al-Din 'Attar and Persian Sufi Didacticism. 

In this talk, Austin O’Malley will introduce the genre of the didactic masnavi before delving into the innovative frame-tale structures that ʿAttar uses to organize his long narrative poems; he will pay special attention to how this structure imaginatively blurs the lines between readers and characters, and oral and textual communication.  

Austin O’Malley, the Roshan Institute Assistant Professor in Persian and Iranian Studies at the University of Arizona, is a scholar of classical Persian literature with a special interest in performance, textuality, and reception, particularly in Sufi contexts. His first book on ‘Attar was published in 2023 by Edinburgh University Press, and he is now beginning a new monograph project on spurious, forged, and misattributed texts in the Persian literary tradition.