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Podcast: Exchanges: A Cambridge UP Podcast
Episode: Afshin Matin-Asgari, "Both Eastern and Western: An Intellectual History of Iranian Modernity" (Cambridge UP, 2018)
Description: Following the Iranian Revolution of 1978—79, public and scholarly interest in Iran have skyrocketed, with a plethora of attempts seeking to understand and explain the events which led up to that moment. However, navigating the terrain of Iran’s modern historical trajectory has proven to be a daunting task which has only intensified, given the muddled public discourse that tends to frame it within the paradigm of a perennial conflict between the “religious,” “traditional,” and “despotic” East versus the “secular,” “modern,” and “enlightened” West.The emergent field of Iranian intellectual history has long sought to rectify and complicate this framing, and numerous p...