Maryam Sanjabi

Senior Lecturer of French 

Maryam Sanjabi, D.E.A. and Ph.D. Université de Paris IV–Sorbonne, faculty member at Yale since 2002: You are a specialist in French literature of the 18th and 20th centuries, depictions of the Middle East in French art and literature, and women’s empowerment and intellectual independence in French literature. Your studies began at Teheran University and continued at the Université de Paris IV–Sorbonne, where you earned your Ph.D. under the guidance of noted Voltaire specialists René Pomeau and Sylvain Menant. In your studies of the Enlightenment and the impacts of French literature on cultural, political, and religious discourses in non-Francophone countries, especially Iran, you have produced a score of published works, such as an early-Persian translation of Molière’s Le Misanthrope, among many others. In compelling prose, you expertly render the sociocultural connotations of the French literary influence and detail how thinkers on the periphery of the Western cultural domain viewed European secularism and criticism of religion. 

Your expertise is wide ranging, from Molière’s comedies and 18th-century French literature to the historical workings of the Persian court, and you have shared your extensive knowledge with generations of students. In your classes, you shared the French literary canon with your students, showing them how to analyze literature in French. Your scholarship and teaching include perspectives on women’s experience, and you gave your students the opportunity to explore how women’s self-narrative relates to female empowerment and intellectual independence. You also taught graduate students in an array of academic fields, and when classes became virtual, you worked out-of-class to ensure that your students could effectively incorporate research-related material in French into their dissertations and research. With your encouragement, students have developed deep and abiding appreciation for French literature. They have shared that your classes enabled them to arrive at a higher degree of understanding of the French literary heritage.  

Your presence in the French Department will be dearly missed. But in your forthcoming works, which will explore Marie Petit’s extraordinary journey from “gambling house to the Persian Court,” 19th-century French travel literature, cross-cultural encounters between Western observers and Persian women, and the correspondence and documents on Jean Chardin/Sir John Chardin, you will continue to lend your keen eye to a wide realm of literary and artistic sources. Your Yale colleagues look forward to these new works with great anticipation.