Omar Khayyam, Edward Fitzgerald and the Rubaiyat

Esmail Z. Behtash is a senior lecturer and the convenor of MA students in English and currently Dean of Faculty in Chabahar Maritime University, Iran. He completed his postgraduate education at the Australian National University (ANU) in the English Faculty working on Edward FitzGerald's Life and Rubáiyát. Dr. Behtash has been a visiting scholar in the UK at the University of Cambridge.

His publications cover two main areas: Victorian Literature and lexicography, writing bilingual dictionaries.

 

Robert Douglas-Fairhurst is a Fellow and Tutor of Magdalen College, Oxford. Between 1996 and 2002 he was a Fellow of Emmanuel College, Cambridge, following periods as a Visiting Fellow at Princeton University and a Junior Research Fellow at Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge. He is the author of *Victorian Afterlives: the shaping of influence in nineteenth-century literature* (OUP, 2002), and has edited *'A Christmas Carol' and Other Christmas Books* (2006), *Great Expectations* (2008) and *London Labour and the London Poor* (forthcoming in 2010) for Oxford World's Classics. A collection of essays celebrating Tennyson's bicentenary, *Tennyson Among the Poets* (co-edited with Seamus Perry), will be published by OUP in the autumn. He is currently writing a book about Dickens's early career.

 

John Drew is a poet and tutor. He runs poetry workshops all over the world, most recently in China and India.

 

Garry Garrard spent his working career in the electronics industry. He became interested in the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam nearly 30 years ago when he started to collect the various editions that have been published in the last 150 years. Researching his collection provided him with an antidote to the incessant pressures of continual board-level meetings, and interminable international travel over almost the entire globe. When he thankfully retired fifteen years ago, at last he had enough time to study in depth all aspects of the subject that now fascinated him. His book on the subject A Book of Verse: The Biography of the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam was published in 2007 and received a first-rate review in the Financial Times. Since that book was published, Garry has undertaken original research on aspects of the translation of the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, which will be summarised in his paper.

 

Erik Gray is Assistant Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University in New York. He is the author of The Poetry of Indifference: From the Romantics to the Rubáiyát (2005) and Milton and the Victorians (2009), and he recently edited a collection of essays on FitzGerald and the Rubáiyát (2008).

 

Michelle Kaiserlian is a Visiting Scholar at the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas at Austin. She is Co-Curator of "The Persian Sensation: The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám in the West," an exhibition at the Ransom Center to open in spring 2009. A doctoral candidate in the Department of the History of Art at Indiana University, her dissertation focuses on the various artistic and literary responses to The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám in Britain and America, c. 1900-1930.

 

Parvin Loloi was educated at the University of Tehran. She obtained her Ph.D. from the University of Swansea, Wales. She works as an independent scholar and writer, and has written extensively on English translations of Persian poetry and also on Persian cultural and literary influences on English literature.

 

Bill Martin and Sandra Mason are independent researchers with a long standing interest in Edward FitzGerald's Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam. They have a substantial collection of different issues of the Rubaiyat and associated material, and they recently produced a book on the numerous illustrated versions of FitzGerald's Rubaiyat. They have also been promoting the idea of celebrating the FitzGerald anniversaries in 2009 as a Year of the Rubaiyat. Bill and Sandra were formerly specialist researchers in the leisure field. Since retiring from their consultancy business, they have been studying Persian and Middle Eastern topics. In addition to their work on FitzGerald's Rubaiyat, they have researched and published on leisure in Islamic countries.

 

Karim Saderi was born in 1957 in Tabriz, Iran. He studied Persian Language and Literature and got his BA and MA degree from Islamic Azad University, Tabriz Branch. He passed Teacher Training Collage courses for two years. He began to teach at high schools from 1978. He has also been teaching at some universities in Tabriz, Bonab and Shabestar since 1992. After his retirement from Ministry of Education in 2007 he has focused his time on teaching at universities and doing research in his field. "Riyaz-ol-Moluk fi Riyazat-es-Soluk" written by "Nezam-ad-Din Shami" is a book of fifteenth century that was edited for the first time by Karim Saderi. He is also a member of Institute for Education Research.

 

Taha Saderi was born in 1985 in Tabriz, Iran. He began his studies in Software Engineering and was graduated from Islamic Azad University, Tabriz Branch at 2007. He continued his studies on Persian language and Literature and got his MA at 2009. He is a member of Young Research Club of Tabriz and Scientific Association, Persian Language and Literature, Islamic Azad. Univ., Tabriz Branch. He has been teaching at Technology College of Tabriz since 2008 and has presented some papers at international conferences on both fields.

 

Dr. Thea Shurgaia is Associated professor of Iv.Javakhishvili Tbilisi State University, senior researcher at G. Tsereteli Institute for Oriental Studies (Georgia). She got her PhD from Iv. Javakhishvili Tbilisi State University (Georgia). The title of her PhD thesis was "Persian Paremiography and Semantic Structure of Persian Proverbs".

• T. Shurgaia is the author of about 30 scientific articles (among them in Persian, English and Russian languages, published in Iran, USA and Russia) and has made several literary and scientific translations.
• She was named as the best Georgian iranologist of the year (2005) by the Embassy of the IR of Iran in Tbilisi. Her fields of interest are: Persian proverbs, general paremiology, modern Persian literature, theory and practice of translation.

 

Marta Simidchieva teaches courses on Islamic history, religion, and culture at York University, and at the University of Toronto. She holds a PhD in Iranian Studies form the Institute of Oriental Studies, Russian Academy of Sciences, Moscow; and a BA in English Literature from the University of Tehran, Iran, where she started her graduate work in Persian studies. Before coming to Canada in 1991, she was an Assistant Professor of Persian literature and culture at the University of Sofia, Bulgaria. Her research focuses on issues of continuity and change, modernity and tradition, and East-West cultural interaction.

 

Adam Talib is writing a doctoral thesis on epigrams and anthologies in pre-Modern Arabic literature. He has also translated a contemporary Arabic novel, *Cairo Swan Song* by Mekkawi Said, which will be published by the American University in Cairo Press this December.

 

Clive Wilmer is a Fellow of Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge, and an Affiliated Lecturer in the Faculty of English at Cambridge.