Call for Papers
Call for Papers: “First Night in Tehranto: Memories and Reflections of Toronto’s Iranian Immigrants”
Toronto is home to the world’s second largest Iranian diaspora. “Tehranto” has become a site of lively Iranian restaurants, cafés, businesses, and cultural experiences. We would like to document this thriving Iranian diaspora by collecting and sharing personal stories of immigration from Iran to Toronto. If you would like to share a memory or personal reflection of your experiences of your early immigrant days, or your first night, in Toronto, please submit a short personal essay of 1000 words and accompanying photograph if you wish. We will be selecting approximately 15 essays to be read in two public forums in Tehranto in May and June 2024. Whether you arrived in the first wave of the 1980s or more recently, as a child, or as an adult, we would love to hear your stories. Our final goal is to collect and publish these essays as a book. Some may be included in an online digitized platform of our larger project.
Suggested Prompts:
- Your first night in Tehranto
- Your early immigrant days in Tehranto
- Your favourite restaurant/café/grocery store, street, or neighbourhood in Tehranto that evokes memories and feelings of “home.”
Please submit your essays in English (or in English translation) to: Amin Moghadam amin.moghadam@torontomu.ca Nima Naghibi nnaghibi@torontomu.ca
Deadline for submissions: April 1, 2024
First time/emerging authors welcome
Amin Moghadam is a Research Lead on the theme, Cities and Migration, at the CERC in Migration at Toronto Metropolitan University. His research explores connections between housing policies, diaspora politics and homeownership experience of Iranian immigrants in Toronto. Amin holds a PhD in Human Geography and Urban Studies from the University of Lyon II, France. His past research and publications have focused on migration policy and practices, diaspora studies, circulation and regional integration in the Middle East, with focus on the Persian Gulf region.
Nima Naghibi is Professor of English at Toronto Metropolitan University. She has written about the intersection of Western and Iranian feminisms and the 1979 feminist protests in Rethinking Global Sisterhood: Western Feminism and Iran (Minnesota Press, 2007), and on diasporic Iranian women’s life narratives in Women Write Iran: Nostalgia and Human Rights from the Diaspora (Minnesota Press, 2016). She has published essays and book chapters on diasporic Iranian memoirs, intergenerational trauma, and cross-cultural feminist exchanges in 20th century Iran.
These public readings, book publication, and an online digitized platform are part of a larger project by Moghadam and Naghibi, entitled, “Tehranto: Stories of Home and Belonging from Toronto’s Iranian Diaspora”
