Dear colleagues, it saddens me to report still another emeritus death this month, on June 25: that of Heshmat Moayyad, Professor Emeritus of Persian Languages and Literatures from 1966 to 2010.   Here is a tribute written by Frank Lewis, in Near Eastern Languages and Literatures:

"Born in Hamadan, Iran, Heshmat Moayyad earned his BA in Persian and Arabic literature from the University of Tehran in 1949. After a year of traveling throughout Iran, he left for Germany to continue his studies in Persian, Islamic Studies, and German at the University of Frankfurt am Main, where he earned his PhD under Hellmut Ritter in 1958. He began teaching in Frankfurt as a Lecturer, moving in 1960 to the Istituto Universitario Orientale in Naples, where he became Professore Incaricato. He first came to the United States as a visiting lecturer at Harvard University in 1962-63, at a time when Persian literature was not generally taught in American universities, and established our Persian program when he came to NELC at Chicago as an Assistant Professor in 1966, becoming full Professor in 1974.  He was also visiting professor at UCLA and at the University of Damascus (1993).  Although unable since 1978 to visit his native Iran because of the persecution of the Baha'i community, he hosted in the 1980s a series of "Persian Poetry Evenings" at the University of Chicago, which for over a decade brought many Persian scholars, writers, poets and musicians from Iran, Afghanistan, and India to campus.

Heshmat Moayyad’s scholarly contributions to the literature and religions of Iran include a score of books, including critical editions, edited volumes and translations, and in excess of one hundred articles and reviews, written in four languages. He was an active, influential translator of modern Persian literature to English and to German. He organized major international conferences at the University of Chicago on the Indo-Persian poet Amir Khosrow (d. 1325), and on the Iranian poetess Parvin Etesâmi (d. 1941), as well as the first academic conference on "The Baha'i Faith and Islam," at McGill University in 1984.  Over the course of more than four decades of active teaching, Prof. Moayyad trained two generations of scholars who teach at more than a half-dozen universities."

-David Bevington, Secretary of Faculty Emeriti and co-chair of the Emeriti Steering Committee

Read another tribute to Prof. Moayyad by Orit Bashkin via the Center for Middle Eastern Studies.