Fonds consists of records documenting the professional and personal life of Prof. Hassanpour, Kurdish-Iranian Marxist scholar and Professor at UofT’s Department of Near and Middle Eastern Civilizations. Material reflects key areas of Prof. Hassanpour’s research, most significantly Kurdish history and culture; the history of political movements, grassroots organization, and class struggle in Iran, Iraq and Turkey; and communication theory and sociolinguistics. Material includes correspondence with colleagues and scholars internationally, documentation of research with particular focus on Prof. Hassanpour’s dissertation and his Peasant Movement Project, records relating to conference presentations, interviews, and teaching, as well as his publishing activity.
Prof. Hassanpour was deeply invested in the preservation of Kurdish oral, visual, and textual documentary heritage as a response to the historical state suppression of cultural-political struggle of Kurdish people. Reflected in records throughout the fonds is Prof. Hassanpour’s work in pursuing the establishment of Kurdish Studies as a discipline, his work editing journals related to Kurdistan, and his effort in exposing and circulating books on Kurdish Studies to libraries and research institutions internationally. Prof. Hassanpour also actively collected and preserved Kurdish texts, dailies, and visual materials. This material is included in Series 9 (Reference material) and through bibliographic and audio material held in other repositories at the University of Toronto Libraries (please see the related material note below).
Hassanpour, Amir
