Mahdi Ganjavi is a multilingual English-Persian educationalist, historian, and researcher with multiple degrees in education, history of Middle East, library science, international law, and law. He obtained his PhD from the Department of Leadership, Higher and adult Education, University of Toronto. His research focuses on the transnational history of education, literature, translation, law, print and publication in the Middle East, the cultural Cold War, and the archives in exile and diasporic archives. Dr. Ganjavi has submitted his book manuscript Education and the Cultural Cold War in the Middle East: The Franklin Book Programs in Iran (forthcoming with I.B. Tauris). Ganjavi’s scholarly writings, essays, and reviews have appeared in the International Journal of Lifelong Education, Encyclopedia Iranica, Iranian Studies, Ajam Media, the Bullet, Global Voices, and Review of the Middle East Studies.
Ganjavi’s translations of lickos, a syllabic poetry of South East Iran has appeared in Modern Poetry in Translation, and also in Asymptote. Ganjavi’s translations of high modernist, eco-poetry, and New York School English poetry into Persian have been published in several literary magazines such as Neveshta, Namomken and Zamaneh. He has also contributed a translation to “Shades of Truth: Iranian Short Fiction of the Fifth Generation in Translation” (Mannani, M & E. Dehnavi Eds., 2019). Between 2016 and 2019, Ganjavi edited and oversaw the publication of five little-known Persian novels from the 1930s and 1940s. These novels shed light on the origins of science fiction, detective fiction, and utopian fiction in Persian.
In 2014, Ganjavi co-edited and published the e-book Bakhtak (Incubus) a collection of 57 Farsi horror stories by authors living both in and outside Iran. The book was called for, launched and promoted via social media as part of an initiative to develop marginal literary genres, and was downloaded 5000 times worldwide, an “unprecedented” literary achievement according to BBC Persian.
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