From October 10-11, 2025, the Middle East Center hosted an exciting interdisciplinary symposium at the University of Washington Seattle campus. The symposium, titled “Gender, Translation, and the Short Form in the Eurasian Periodical,” brought together scholars working across Urdu, Persian, Uzbek, Hindi and Tamil literary-periodical cultures in two days of stimulating panels, talks, and rich discussions. The event was generously co-sponsored by the South Asia Center, Middle Eastern Languages & Cultures (MELC), including the Persian and Iranian Studies Program (PISP), the Ottoman and Turkish Studies Program, Slavic Languages and Literatures, Global Literary Studies (GLITS), and the Simpson Center for the Humanities. This wide range of departments and centers that supported the symposium reflects the diverse regions and languages discussed by the scholars who participated in the symposium itself.
The symposium opened with presentations by Dr. Zain Mian (University of Toronto) and Sumaira Nawaz (McGill University), who discussed the prevalence of translations and the importance of a female reading audience in the early 19th century Urdu periodical Makhzan (a calque on the English word ‘magazine’), and the ‘translator’ and religious scholar Maulana Amir Usmani’s 1970s satirical column “From the Mosque to the Tavern” in the Urdu journal Tajalli, respectively. The presentations were met with laughter and bubbling enthusiasm from audience members, many of whom work in South Asian studies or adjacent fields.
The second panel featured presentations by Anna Learn (University of Washington) and Dr. Razieh Araghi (Arizona State University). Learn discussed the literary politics of a Persian translation of a female Scottish writer’s travelogue in the Afghan newspaper Anis in the early 1950s, and Dr. Araghi presented on the appearance of exceptional female figures in Persian translation in early 20th century Iranian women’s periodicals. 
Learn and Dr. Araghi were the co-organizers of the “Gender, Translation, and the Short Form in the Eurasian Periodical” symposium, and are planning to bring together a special issue based on the papers presented at last week’s meeting. This most recent in-person gathering of the symposium came on the heels of an earlier symposium meeting, which took place online on April 10-11, 2025.
After a morning of panels and exuberant discussion among panelists and audience members alike, the room was bursting with audience members as the keynote speaker, the esteemed scholar of Hindi and South Asian literature, Dr. Francesca Orsini (SOAS), who gave a talk on gender and translation in 20th century Hindi periodicals. Attendees were enrapt by Dr. Orsini’s talk, and the following Q&A session lasted well over 45 minutes, as hands kept going up around the room. The University of Washington community was honored and energized by Dr. Orsini’s sweeping and provocative talk. You can access a recording of Dr. Orsini’s talk here (Please email mecuw@uw.edu for access).
The second day of the symposium featured a panel with three presenters. Dr. Jennifer Dubrow (University of Washington) analyzed a one-act play composed by the Urdu writer Rashid Jahan in the context of early 20th century colonial Indian periodical and radio culture, Dr. Preetha Mani (Rutgers University) talked about the abstraction of gender in several mid-century Tamil poems of the pudu kavideh movement, and Dr. Claire Roosien (Yale University) presented on the female Uzbek poet Zulfiya, and her changing poetics of intimacy and politics from the 1930s to the late 1950s. Finally, the symposium concluded with a roundtable “takeaway” session, in which panelists and audience members discussed their main impressions from the symposium, and the news ways that they had come to think about gender, translation, and the short form when reading literature and periodicals.
Symposium co-organizer Anna Learn would like to warmly thank Dr. Aria Fani for his exceptional support in making this two-part symposium a reality. She would also like to acknowledge Nick Gottschall, Sameera Ibrahim, Isabelle Schlegel, and Katie Sandler for their incredibly helpful work to coordinate, organize, and execute day-of logistics for the symposium.
