Born in mid-1980s Iran, I grew up hearing “Marg bar Āmrīkā” (Down with the US). This was my first encounter with the US and this still continues to be the Iranian state's way of introducing the US to us: the “Great Satan.” As a schoolboy I was exposed to the school textbooks, which “sketch a dark picture of the Iranian regime's alleged enemy.” At the same time, my parents sent me to a language school to learn English. The textbooks were not Iranian and the image they depicted of the US was not that of the “Great Satan.” After the 9/11 attacks and during the period in which “axis of evil” discourse was popular, I started studying English literature at university. As an undergraduate, I came to know a different US, a country that was not as evil as depicted by the Iranian state. Although there has been (and still is) no major for American literature in Iranian academia, I did a comparative study on R.W. Emerson and Suhrāb Sipihrī in my MA thesis and I could find some points of similarity and, of course, points of difference between two enemy countries.

In my PhD dissertation, a comparative study of Walt Whitman and Nīmā Yūshīj's literary innovations, I investigated the sociopolitical and literary contexts of nineteenth-century America and those of constitutional Iran to analyse how Whitman and Nīmā translated the discourses of their societies into literary discourses and developed free verse and New Poetry. There I realised some significant points of convergence between the two countries. Having worked comparatively on American literature and Persian poetry, I became interested in the cultural and literary relations between the two countries. In a section entitled “Suggestions for Further Study” in my dissertation I mentioned the reception of Whitman in Persian-speaking countries as a topic one can delve into. During my Humboldt postdoctoral fellowship I turned towards reception studies and developed my research into a broad study of Whitman's Iranian reception to delve into the cultural and literary relations between the “Great Satan” and a significant constituent of “the axis of evil.”

In Iran American literature is known mainly for plays and novels, with staged performances of plays by Tennessee Williams and Arthur Miller along with translations of works by Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, Herman Melville and Mark Twain, and more recently Jhumpa Lahiri, J.D. Salinger, Paul Auster, Saul Bellow and Joyce Carol Oates.