Azar Nafisi in Conversation: The Role of Literature in Times of Crisis

Azar Nafisi is a lifelong champion and ardent supporter of the importance of Humanities and Liberal Arts and the role they play in the preservation and promotion of democracy. She is best known as the author of the national bestseller Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books, which electrified its readers with a compassionate and often harrowing portrait of the Islamic revolution in Iran and how it affected one university professor and her students.

Reading Lolita in Tehran has spent over 117 weeks on The New York Times bestseller list, been translated into 32 languages, and won numerous awards including the Prix du Meilleur Livre Étranger and the Booksense Non-fiction Book of the Year. Her latest work is Read Dangerously: The Subversive Power of Literature in Troubled Times (2022).

Between 1997 and 2017, Nafisi was a Fellow at Johns Hopkins SAIS and taught aesthetics, culture, and literature. She earned her Ph.D. from the University of Oklahoma, taught in Iran, and was expelled from the University of Tehran for refusing to wear the veil. She has also held a fellowship at Oxford University.

Nafisi is a strong advocate for Iran’s intellectuals and youth, especially women. She writes and lectures widely in English and Persian about literature, culture, and human rights. Her honors include the Cristóbal Gabarrón Foundation Award and honorary doctorates from several institutions.

She has contributed to The New York Times, Washington Post, and The Wall Street Journal, among others, and has written or contributed to numerous books, including That Other World, The Republic of Imagination, and Things I’ve Been Silent About.

Photo by Yousef Al-Abdullah

Leeya Mehta is a prize-winning poet, fiction writer and essayist. She is a widely published writer, and her short fiction and poetry have appeared in publications in the UK, India, the US, and Austria. Her poetry collection A Story of the World Before the Fence “is a lush, lyrical study of memory and history,” writes Tim Seibles, former Poet Laureate of Virginia.

In 2022 her work was anthologized in the Penguin Book of Modern Indian Poets and in Future Work, an anthology of contemporary Indian writers from Red Hen Press. Her novel, Extinction, is forthcoming with Simon and Schuster in 2026.

After spending a decade at the World Bank in Washington, D.C., Leeya is now the Director of the Alan Cheuse International Writers Center at George Mason University, where she invited Azar Nafisi to give the inaugural Cheuse lecture of ideas. Mehta shares Nafisi’s writing with all sections of her undergraduate classes on contemporary and twentieth century writers.

Nafisi inspired a series of essays for the Cheuse Center titled ‘Open suitcases’, where young writers explore their own lives in the context of reading and responding to literature in public life. They keep their suitcases open as they travel with books and their own writing, inhabiting Nafisi’s Republic of Imagination.

In September 2025 Mehta will receive the Faculty Member of the Year Award from George Mason University. In 2024, Mehta received the Faculty Civic Excellence Award for her work within the classroom, and the curation of the 13-month Baldwin100 project celebrating James Baldwin’s centennial. The project involved 16 DMV organizations and produced over 28 events and exhibitions. It earned two American Graphic Design Awards, including for Nothing Personal: A Collaboration in Black and White (see more here).

Read more about the Center’s work here: https://cheusecenter.gmu.edu

Photo by Michaela Hackner