PRE-ORDER
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The Baskerville Institute is partnering with the King’s English Bookshop to provide signed copies of Reza Aslan’s forthcoming book The American Martyr in Persia: The Epic Life & Tragic Death of Howard Baskerville.
Listen to Reza Aslan discuss why he wrote this book:
INTERNS
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Invest in our internship program and help us make a difference in the world by providing young students with the opportunity to work with our programs.
Check out this clip from our 2022 Intern Roundtable Webinar!
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NOWRUZ RECEPTION 2022
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Thank you to all of our guests who attended our 2022 Nowruz Reception in March! To see more images from our event, check out our website or click the link below!
SPECIAL THANK YOU
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A special thanks to Reza and Shireen Khazeni for their generous contribution. On behalf of the Baskerville Institute, we thank you for your support. The cultural connections between the United States and Iran run deep. Howard C. Baskerville, who sacrificed his life for Iranian constitutionalism in 1909, bestowed to posterity a model of friendship that is relevant today because it provides an alternative to the mutual satanization and perpetual conflict that has defined US – Iran relations since 1979.
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COMMUNITY SCHOOL ORAL HISTORY PROJECT (CSOHP)
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The Baskerville Institute is pleased to support Professor Matthew Shannon – Associate Professor of History at Emory & Henry College – for the Community School Oral History Project.
The Community School Oral History Project (CSOHP) explores the history of the Community School of Tehran (1935-80) through interviews with former students, faculty, and staff from across the United States and the world. With support from the Baskerville Institute, Emory & Henry College, and the Presbyterian Historical Institute, Shannon will conduct interviews in-person and remotely. The recordings and their transcriptions will be preserved and made freely available through Pearl Digital Collections, the Presbyterian Historical Society’s online archive.
The Baskerville Institute facilitates the work of research scholars and partner institutions in documenting histories of American-Iranian friendship, including the Community School Oral History Project. There are many excellent oral histories that deal with different aspects of Iran’s relationship with the world (the Peace Corps, for example), but there has never been a systematic oral history project on the Presbyterian experience or international education in Iran.
Consider making a donation to this important project. With your help, Professor Shannon will be able to conduct interviews with alumni located throughout the United States and abroad.
To schedule an interview, contact Matthew Shannon: mshannon@ehc.edu
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THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL MAY 2022
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Lethal Encounter in Tehran: The Attack on U.S. Vice Consul Robert W. Imbrie and Its Aftermath
“Almost a century ago, an American diplomat died overseas at the hands of a mob. The implications of this tragic incident reached far beyond Iran’s capital city.”
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FALL 2022 WEBINARS
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“Republics of Myth: National Narratives and the
US-Iran Conflict”
September 6, 2022
3 PM (EST)
Hussein Banai, Malcolm Byrne, and John Tirman
Join the Baskerville Institute Book Conversation with the authors of Republics of Myth: National Narratives and the US-Iran Conflict. Iran and the United States have been at odds for forty years, locked in a cold war that has run the gamut from harsh rhetoric to hostage-taking, from crippling sanctions to targeted killings. In Republics of Myth, Hussein Banai, Malcolm Byrne, and John Tirman argue that a major contributing factor to this tenacious enmity is how each nation views itself. The two nations have differing interests and grievances about each other, but their often-deadly confrontation derives from the very different national narratives.
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“Seizing a Crown: How the Murder of a US Vice Consul led to the Creation of the Pahlavi Dynasty”
September 19, 2022
2 PM (EST)
Susan Stein
Susan M. Stein tells the story of a figure steeped in adventure and history. Imbrie rejected a legal career to volunteer as an ambulance driver during World War I and joined the State Department when the United States entered the war. Assigned to Russia, he witnessed the October Revolution, fled ahead of a Bolshevik arrest order, and continued to track communist activity in Turkey even as the country’s war of independence unfolded around him. His fateful assignment to Persia led to his death at age forty-one and set off political repercussions that cloud relations between the United States and Iran to this day.
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REZA ASLAN IN SALT LAKE CITY
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If you are in Salt Lake City, Utah, please join us for this unique book signing event!
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“Believers: Love and Death in Tehran”
November 7, 2022
12 PM (EST)
John Limbert and Marc Grossman
The Baskerville Institute Book Conversation with the authors of “Believers: Love and Death in Tehran” (Mazda Publishers, 2020). Written by Ambassadors (ret.) Marc Grossman and John Limbert, BELIEVER is a work of fiction set in Iran and Washington, D.C., during the 1980s and the present. The hero is the fictional FSO Nilufar Hartman, daughter of an Iranian mother and an American father. With the liberty of novelists, the authors have imagined her in scenes both historical and fictional with people real and invented. The following adapted excerpt, set in late 1980 and early 1981, ends with the release of 52 American hostages on Jan. 20, 1981, just a few minutes after Ronald Reagan took his presidential oath of office.
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MAKE A GIFT
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Support our programs by donating to the Baskerville Institute.
The Baskerville Institute builds on its namesake’s legacy to promote understanding and respect between Americans and Iranians.
We run a lecture/webinar series, host a digital archive, support research fellows and student interns, publish a newsletter and translation projects, organize cultural exhibitions and educational programs, and otherwise facilitate bridge-building between Americans and Iranians.
Watch our 2021 Activities Video
Checks are also acceptable; please make them payable to the Baskerville Institute and mail them to our office address:
350 E 400 S
Salt Lake City, UT, 84111
Suite #407
BASKERVILLE INSTITUTE
2021-2022 SPEAKERS
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PREVIOUS LECTURES
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“The Paradox for US Iranian Emigres in a Globalizing World: the Americanization of the first Iranian (Assyrian) Medical Family 120 Years Ago”
Dr. Eden Naby
Historian/Scholar
A cultural historian of the Middle East and Central Asia, Eden Naby began her career as a Peace Corps volunteer in Afghanistan and moved on to a Columbia University PhD that led eventually to her application of ethnic and religious minority studies principles to the study of Assyrians in the Middle East. She and her late husband, Richard Nelson Frye (Harvard University) initiated Assyrian endowments at several universities that have helped to shape holdings on modern Assyrians at Harvard, Columbia, and Berkeley. Among her many articles on Assyrians are the key introduction to Assyrians in the former Soviet Union (1975), the use of the pre-WWI Assyrian periodical press to analyze Assyrian cultural progress (1977, 2006), her work at the Foundation for Endangered Languages and the Encyclopedia Iranica.
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“What Makes Us Iranian? An Exploration of the Iranian Diaspora Forty Years On”
Director Persis Karim
Center for Iranian Diaspora Studies at San Francisco State University
Persis Karim holds the Neda Nobari Chair and directs the Center for Iranian Diaspora Studies at San Francisco State University and teaches in the Department of Comparative and World Literature. She is the author of numerous articles on Iranian diaspora literature and culture and served as guest editor for Iranian Studies, MELUS: Multi-Ethnic Literatures of the United States, and Comparative Studies of South Asian, African and Middle East Studies. She is the editor of three anthologies of Iranian diaspora literature: Tremors: New Fiction by Iranian-American Writers (2013); Let Me Tell You Where I’ve Been: New Writing by Women of the Iranian Diaspora (2006), and A World Between: Poems, Stories and Essays by Iranian-Americans (1999).
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“An American Martyr in Persia: The Epic Life and Tragic Death of Howard C. Baskerville”
Reza Aslan
University of California Riverside
A Conversation with Reza Aslan, an internationally acclaimed writer, Emmy-nominated producer, professor, and New York Times Best Selling Author.
Reza Aslan discusses his forthcoming book on Howard C. Baskerville which will be published by W.W. Norton & Company in October 2022. Includes an exclusive reading during the webinar.
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BASKERVILLE INSTITUTE SUMMER READINGS
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In the Lion’s Shadow: The Iranian Schindler and His Homeland in the Second World War
by Fariborz Mokhtari
On Distant Service: The Life of the First U.S. Foreign Service Officer to Be Assassinated
by Susan M. Stein
Crossing the Red Line: The Struggle for Human Rights in Iran
by Mihrangiz Kar
Believers: Love and Death in Tehran
by Marc Grossman and John Limbert
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MAKE A GIFT
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The American expat Louise Firouz (1933-2008) is credited with saving the pony-sized Caspian horses from extinction.
Louise Firouz travelled to Iran with her husband to save the dying race of Caspian horses. She spent her life dedicating herself to her horses and her family before passing away in her home in Iran in 2008 at the age of 74.
“The quality of the breed should improve with each succeeding generation. This heritage has been bequeathed to Caspian breeders now all around the world and it is the responsibility of these breeders not only to preserve the breed but to guard against hereditary faults and unprincipled dealers who pass on defective animals as sound horses. Fellow owners and breeders of the Caspian. I gave you Equus fossilis orientalis persicus. You give me the perfect Caspian.”
– Louise Firouz
“The quality of the breed should improve with each succeeding generation. This heritage has been bequeathed to Caspian breeders now all around the world and it is the responsibility of these breeders not only to preserve the breed but to guard against hereditary faults and unprincipled dealers who pass on defective animals as sound horses. Fellow owners and breeders of the Caspian. I gave you Equus fossilis orientalis persicus. You give me the perfect Caspian.”
– Louise Firouz
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BASKERVILLE INSTITUTE DIGITAL FRIENDSHIP
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BIDF is a project of the Baskerville Institute, a nonprofit, nonpartisan, nongovernmental organization devoted to supporting and strengthening the bonds of friendships between Iranians and Americans. The BIDF carries out this mission by providing a digital portal for Iranian students inside Iran to connect to hundreds of online courses offered by American universities. BDIF’s primary mission is to make it possible for qualified Iranian students in Iran to go through one website for their research on online courses offered by American universities.
This unique initiative will make it possible for Iranian students to learn more about democratic governance, market economies, and free societies.
In addition, they would be able to establish networks among themselves as well as build relationships with US educational institutions. Arguably, these students comprise the most important segment of Iranian society because it is they who will forge Iran’s future. This is an educational program in the interests of the United States, as well as – educationally speaking – a benefit for the Iranian students. The true significance of this project is that it will help compensate for the dearth of positive programs the US currently manages for influencing the most important people in Iran, its youth.
Forty-plus years of political disputes have severely limited cultural interaction between the two countries and has restricted young Iranians’ access to the academic and social values of American education. This project will provide young Iranians something that has been available to very few: an exposure to the United States untainted by the extreme, toxic rhetoric of their government.
These young people will shape their country’s future, and this program will allow them to do so without the intellectual separation that the Islamic Republic has attempted to impose. This is a very worthwhile program for both Americans and Iranians. Among these Iranian students there is a great hunger to know the realities of the outside world. They should not be kept in isolation.
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