Mahnaz Yousefzadeh

Clinical Professor

Mahnaz Yousefzadeh is a historian of Modern Italy and Early Modern Mediterranean. She is the author of City and Nation in Italian Unification (Palgrave Macmillan 2011) and Florence’s Embassy to Sultan of Egypt (Palgrave, 2018), as well as articles on the relation of Italy and Persia in the Early Modern Period, and aesthetics and politics in European nation-building. Her current projects—one academic and the other a creative non-fiction—trace encounters between traditions through the movement of people, artifacts, and images. Her scholarly book project examines Florence’s relation to Persia in the 16th-century. Mahnaz’s creative non-fiction is similarly concerned with recovering ethical voices and meanings by revisiting as translator, mediator, and the traveler, her migration from and return to Iran after decades of living in the west. 

Education

Ph.D. – State University of New York in Binghamton

Teaching and Research Interests

Aesthetics and politics of the modern; Mediterranean History; Genealogy of the Contemporary; Arts and Cultures and Global Works and Society

Selected Honors and Awards

Invited participant in Global Institute Workshop, 2015–16, directed by Bob Squillace and Ulrich Baer

NYU Global Research Institute London, Spring 2015

Curricular Development Faculty Challenge Grant, NYU, for “In the Beginning Was Dance,” 2014–15

Global Research Institute Research Grant, NYU, for “Persians at the Medici Court,” Spring 2015

Endorsement by the British Academy, as internationally known scholar 

NYU Humanities Grants in Aid, 2012

NYU Challenge Grant, Summer 2010

NEH Summer Fellowship, American Academy in Rome, Summer 2007

Selected Publications

Books

  • Florence’s Embassy to Sultan of Egypt: An English Translation of Felice Brancacci’s Diary. London and New York: Palgrave, 2018.
  • City and Nation in the Italian Unification: The National Festivals of Dante. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011.

Articles and Book Chapters

  • “Shafii al-Sharif’s Subhat-al-Akhbar in the Medici Collection: Visualizing Royal Genealogy in the Persico-Islamic and the Medici Courts,” I Tatti Studies in the Italian Renaissance 21, no. 1 (Spring 2018): 159-183.
  • Mahnaz Yousefzadeh, “Sea of Oman: Ferdinand I, G.B. Vecchietti and the Armour of Shah Abbas I,” Revista degli Studi Orientali, 2017; 51-71.
  • “The Burrato of the Bargello: The Saracen Prop and the Three Persian knights of Francesco I,” in Awam Acampa ed., Resignifications. Rome: Postcart, 2016. pp. 165-171.
  • “Translating Dignity,” Electra Street: Journal of Arts and Humanities, October 2016.
  • “Florence’s Persia: Magi, Merchants and Cavaliers,” Serena Dipina, Felicita Tramontata, and Giuseppe Marcocci eds., Christian-Islamic Interactions in the Early Modern Mediterranean. (University of Maryland Press: under peer review)
  • “Canonicity and Popularity in the Nineteenth Century: Dante, Schiller and Shakespeare Festivals,” in Joep Leerssen and Anne Rigney eds., Commemorating Writers in Nineteenth Century Europe: Nation Building and Centenary Fever (2014, Palgrave Macmillan)
  • “Can Interaction Design Civilize the Experience Economy?” Interactions ACM, July-August 2013.
  • “Anti-Hegemonic Nationalism: The 1865 Centenary Festa of Dante,” in Peter Arnade and Michael Rocke, eds., Private Conduct, Gender, and Public Life in Early Modern  Europe and Mesoamerica: Essays in Honor of Richard C. Trexler, Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Research, Essays and Studies, University of Toronto, 2008.
  • “What is Iranian Jewish?” Shofar vol. 6, no. 2 (1995).

Conferences and Presentations

  • “Persiana Pompa da Anima Toscana: The Medici's Persian Magi, Merchants and Cavalieri,” Invited lecture at NYU Department of Italian Studies, November 2014.
  • Keynote speaker, “Dante and Milton: Visionary Nationalist.” Conference November 2013, University of London.
  • “Shah Abbas at the Court of the Medicis,” invited presentation at Circolo Italiano, London, October 4, 2013. Invited Speaker, University Research Seminar, University College London, March 2013.