Please join Persian Circle on November 17th at 5:30pm (note the later time!) for a talk by Niloofar Sarlati of the University of Minnesota:

The Child and the West in Iran: A Look at The Institute for the Intellectual Development of Children and Young Adults (KANOON)

Children literature and attention to children’s free time in publication is known to be a modern phenomena in the West. This is especially true if we recognize Walter Benjamin and J.R.R. Tolkien’s observation that fairytales, fairy stories, and storytelling were historically never really produced for children exclusively. Same can be said about Iran in regard to the attention to children in the publication industry. It is not until the Constitutional Movement that along with the shift of attention to political modernity, the first children magazine also published in Iran. This talk attends to this relationship between children and the West in Iran through looking at The Institute for the Intellectual Development of Children and Young Adults, an institute which is internationally most recognized as dedicated to the “development of children” in Iran and which was established three decades before the Revolution of 1979.