Michael Craig Hillmann (born May 5, 1940) is professor of Persian Studies at the University of Texas at Austin and President of Persepolis Institute, Inc. He has published widely on Persian language and literature and specializes in lyric Persian verse, Persian prose fiction from the 1920s through the 1970s, and literary autobiography. Since the late 1990s, he has focused on Persian instructional materials development, resulting in, among other things, a new Persian language learning syllabus in four volumes called "Persian for America(ns)."
He has published two autobiographical books titled From Durham to Tehran (1991) and From Classroom to Courtroom (2008). In From Classroom to Courtroom, he tells the story of how academics at the Middle Eastern Studies department became involved in cross-cultural conflicts which resulted in official complaints, allegations of abuse, discrimination, harassment, racism, and a lawsuit against the university. Hillmann is at work on a third and final autobiographical essay called To and From a Maine Village and a new Persian dictionary for Hippocrene Books.
Selected publications
From Classroom to Courtroom (AuthorHouse 2008) ISBN1434350622
Tajiki Textbook and Reader: Second Edition (Dunwoody Press 2003) ISBN1881265986
Persian, also known by its endonym Farsi or Parsi, is a Western Iranian language belonging to the Iranian branch of the Indo-Iranian subdivision of the Indo-European languages. Persian is a pluricentric language predominantly spoken and used officially within Iran, Afghanistan, and Tajikistan in three mutually intelligible standard varieties, namely Iranian Persian, Dari Persian, and Tajiki Persian. It is also spoken natively in the Tajik variety by a significant population within Uzbekistan, as well as within other regions with a Persianate history in the cultural sphere of Greater Iran. It is written officially within Iran and Afghanistan in the Persian alphabet, a derivative of the Arabic script, and within Tajikistan in the Tajik alphabet, a derivative of the Cyrillic script.
The Persians are an Iranian ethnic group who comprise over half of the population of Iran. They share a common cultural system and are native speakers of the Persian language as well as of the languages that are closely related to Persian.
Persepolis was the ceremonial capital of the Achaemenid Empire. It is situated in the plains of Marvdasht, encircled by southern Zagros mountains in Iran. It is one of the key Iranian Cultural Heritages. The city of Shiraz is situated 60 km (37 mi) southwest of Persepolis. UNESCO declared the ruins of Persepolis a World Heritage Site in 1979.
Elam was an ancient civilization centered in the far west and southwest of modern-day Iran, stretching from the lowlands of what is now Khuzestan and Ilam Province as well as a small part of southern Iraq. The modern name Elam stems from the Sumerian transliteration elam(a), along with the later Akkadian elamtu, and the Elamite haltamti. Elamite states were among the leading political forces of the Ancient Near East. In classical literature, Elam was also known as Susiana, a name derived from its capital Susa.
Cuneiform is a logo-syllabic writing system that was used to write several languages of the Ancient Near East. The script was in active use from the early Bronze Age until the beginning of the Common Era. Cuneiform scripts are marked by and named for the characteristic wedge-shaped impressions which form their signs. Cuneiform is the earliest known writing system and was originally developed to write the Sumerian language of southern Mesopotamia.
Old Persian is one of two directly attested Old Iranian languages and is the ancestor of Middle Persian. Like other Old Iranian languages, it was known to its native speakers as ariya (Iranian). Old Persian is close to both Avestan and the language of the Rig Veda, the oldest form of the Sanskrit language. All three languages are highly inflected.
The Institute for the Study of Ancient Cultures, West Asia & North Africa, established in 1919, is the University of Chicago's interdisciplinary research center for ancient Near Eastern studies and archaeology museum. It was founded for the university by Egyptology and ancient history professor James Henry Breasted with funds donated by John D. Rockefeller Jr. It conducts research on ancient civilizations throughout the Near East, including at its facility, Chicago House, in Luxor, Egypt. The institute also publicly exhibits an extensive collection of artifacts related to ancient civilizations and archaeological discoveries at its on-campus building in Hyde Park, Chicago. According to anthropologist William Parkinson of the Field Museum, the ISAC's highly focused "near Eastern, or southwest Asian and Egyptian" collection is one of the finest in the world.
Marjane Satrapi is a French-Iranian graphic novelist, cartoonist, illustrator, film director, and children's book author. Her best-known works include the graphic novel Persepolis and its film adaptation, the graphic novel Chicken with Plums, Woman, Life, Freedom and the Marie Curie biopic Radioactive.
Forugh Farrokhzad was an influential Iranian poet and film director. She was a controversial modernist poet and an iconoclastic, feminist author. Farrokhzad died in a car accident at the age of 32.
Persepolis is a series of autobiographical graphic novels by Marjane Satrapi that depict her childhood and early adult years in Iran and Austria during and after the Islamic Revolution. The title Persepolis is a reference to the ancient capital of the Persian Empire. Originally published in French, Persepolis has been translated to many other languages. As of 2018, it has sold more than 2 million copies worldwide.
The Iranian languages, also called the Iranic languages, are a branch of the Indo-Iranian languages in the Indo-European language family that are spoken natively by the Iranian peoples, predominantly in the Iranian Plateau.
William Orman Beeman is an American scholar whose specialty is the Middle East. He is Professor Emeritus of anthropology at the University of Minnesota, where he was Chair of the Department of Anthropology for 13 years until his retirement in 2020. He has authored many articles and fourteen books on Iranian politics, theatre, language, and culture.
Touraj Daryaee is an Iranian Iranologist and historian. He currently works as the Maseeh Chair in Persian Studies and Culture and the director of the Dr. Samuel M. Jordan Center for Persian Studies at the University of California, Irvine.
Alireza Shapour Shahbazi was a prominent Persian archaeologist, Iranologist and a world expert on Achaemenid archaeology. Shahbazi got a BA degree in and an MA degree in East Asian archaeology from SOAS. Shahbazi had a doctorate degree in Achaemenid archaeology from University of London. Alireza Shapour Shahbazi was a lecturer in Achaemenid archaeology and Iranology at Harvard University. He was also a full professor of archaeology at Shiraz University and founded at Persepolis the Institute of Achaemenid Research in 1974. After the Islamic revolution, he moved to the US, firstly teaching at Columbia University and then later becoming a full professor of history in Eastern Oregon University.
The Persepolis Fortification Archive and Persepolis Treasury Archive are two groups of clay administrative archives — sets of records physically stored together – found in Persepolis dating to the Achaemenid Persian Empire. The discovery was made during legal excavations conducted by the archaeologists from the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago in the 1930s. Hence they are named for their in situ findspot: Persepolis. The archaeological excavations at Persepolis for the Oriental Institute were initially directed by Ernst Herzfeld from 1931 to 1934 and carried on from 1934 until 1939 by Erich Schmidt.
Fatemeh Keshavarz Ph.D. is an Iranian academic, Rumi and Persian studies scholar, and a poet in Persian and English. She is the Roshan Chair of Persian Studies and Director of the Roshan Institute for Persian Studies at the University of Maryland, since 2012. Previously, she served as a professor of Persian Language and Comparative Literature for twenty years and chair of the department of Asian and Near Eastern Languages and Literatures at Washington University in St. Louis from 2004 to 2011.
Joseph Albert Kéchichian is a political scientist.
Shahrokh Razmjou is an Iranian archaeologist and historian, specializing in Achaemenid Archaeology and History. He received his PhD in Achaemenid Archaeology at the University of London. He established the Inscriptions Hall (1998–1999) and the Centre for Achaemenid Studies (2001) at the National Museum of Iran. He was curator of Ancient Iran in the Department of the Middle East, British Museum (2009–2012) and during this time, he produced a new updated translation of the text on the Cyrus Cylinder from Babylonian to Persian. He also excavated the ancient man-made caves of Niyasar, Kashan. He is currently teaching at the Department of Archaeology, University of Tehran.
Vesta Sarkhosh Curtis is the British Museum's Curator of Middle Eastern coins. She is Joint Director of the International Parthian Coin Project, The Sylloge Nummorum Parthicorum (SNP), and Joint Editor of the SNP series.
Mohammad Reza Ghanoonparvar is a Professor Emeritus of Persian and Comparative Literature at the Faculty of Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Texas, Austin, whose expertise includes the works of Simin Daneshvar, Sadeq Chubak, and Sadeq Hedayat.
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