with Lucy Deacon

In this webinar, Dr. Lucy Deacon presents on her new book Karbala in the Taʿziyeh Episode: Shiʿi Devotional Drama in Iran (2024). Verisimilitude is not the endeavour of this type of drama; taʿziyeh is a devotional offering that stirs lament for the the Shiʿi martyrs by representing events crucial to sacred history. But what does that retelling entail? Through study of four of its main episodes—from their long inter-female dialogues to the protagonists’ encounters with jinn, dervishes, and foreigners—this book explores the taʿziyeh repertoire’s compositional features. Combining a wide range of historical scripts, largely unpublished manuscripts, with witness accounts, it tracks the tradition’s development from Safavid to Qajar Iran asking, who were its contributors? And, how have they left their mark?

About the Speaker:

Lucy Deacon (PhD University of Edinburgh 2022) is a specialist in devotional drama with an advanced knowledge of Persian, and a background in performing arts. Her research to date has largely concerned the Iranian Shiʿi tradition of taʿziyeh-khānī, spanning matters from its inception in the 17th century, to its rapid development during the 19th century C.E., its ongoing role in present-day popular piety, and its dramaturgy. Her approach combines performance attendance with the examination of historical scripts, in manuscript form, drawing from those in the collections of European libraries, namely Vatican Library’s Cerulli Persian Collection. A separate strand of her research addresses the nature of such collections, and the journeys of Persian and Arabic manuscripts between their places of initial provenance and Europe. Recently she has begun comparative work looking at the intersections between Shiʿi, Christian, and Jewish dramatic traditions, and is currently a post-doctoral researcher on the project “Women, Martyrdom, & Religious Drama in the Abrahamic Traditions” (WOMARD), at the University of Fribourg (Switzerland).