Pouneh Shabani-Jadidi is instructional professor of Persian in the Department of Near Eastern Language and Civilizations at the University of Chicago. She holds a Ph.D. in linguistics from the University of Ottawa (2012) as well as a Ph.D. in applied linguistics with a focus on translation from Tehran Azad University (2004). She has published on a variety of topics including translation, linguistics, and second language acquisition. In addition, she has translated several books from Persian to English. She is the editor of The Routledge Handbook of Second Language Acquisition and Pedagogy of Persian and co-editor of The Oxford Handbook of Persian Linguistics.
Michelle Quay is visiting lecturer of Persian at Brown University. She has taught Persian language and literature at the University of Chicago, Columbia University, and the University ofCambridge. As a Gates Cambridge Scholar, she undertook research for her dissertation on depictions of gender in premodern Persian literature, particularly in the writings of Farid al-Din ’Attar and other early Sufi mystics. She was awarded her doctorate from Pembroke College, University of Cambridge, in 2018.
Patricia J. Higgins is university distinguished service professor emerita at SUNY Plattsburgh. She received a Ph.D. in anthropology from the University of California, Berkeley in 1974. Besides an eighteen-month ethnographic study of education and socialization in Tehran, she spent ten months as a Fulbright Lecturer at the University of Tehran. She is co-translator, with Pouneh Shabani-Jadidi, of Hafez in Love: A Novel by Iraj Pezeshkzad. At SUNY Plattsburgh, she served as a faculty member, an associate vice president, and then interim provost and vice president for academic affairs.