Although the British scholar Edward Granville Browne died just over 90 years ago, his foundational scholarship continues to be relevant to the field of Iranian studies. Contemporary scholars of Iran still engage directly with his works in their studies of the 1906 Constitutional Revolution, classical and modern Persian literature, and early Babi-Baha’i history. There has been less attention, however, to how Iranians received Browne’s ideas during and shortly after his own lifetime. This paper focuses on Browne’s reception in Iran by a host of literary and political figures who either met with him, corresponded with him, or read him from afar. It begins by considering Browne’s unique approach to studies of Iran, which was characterized by a wide-ranging series of exchanges with Iranians themselves about their history, politics, and literature. Contrary to many contemporary historiographical evaluations of Browne, this paper argues that he was by no means an ivory-tower Orientalist who crafted a totalizing narrative of Persian literature or the 1906 Iranian Constitutional Revolution that later Iranian nationalists slavishly imitated. The paper then shifts to two events that drew the attention of Browne’s many Iranian interlocutors: his sixtieth birthday in 1921 and his death in 1926. Using unpublished letters and poems, as well as published obituaries, translations, and commemorative volumes, it examines how contemporary Iranians generally viewed Browne as an anti-imperial figure who challenged British policies towards Iran. Many Iranians considered Browne’s canonization of Persian poetry as an external validation of indigenous nationalist efforts to do the same. Browne also became the object of contemporary critique from other segments of Iranian society: to opponents of classical Persian literature like Ahmad Kasravi, Browne was thought to reinforce a reactionary and “backwards” tendency within Iran while to certain Iranian Baha’is, his scholarship on early Babi history were viewed as deviations from official hagiography. This paper suggests that instead of reading Browne’s writings anachronistically as a foil to contemporary scholarly approaches, it would be more productive to situate him among his Iranian contemporaries to better understand the broadly reciprocal set of transnational relationships that shaped debates over Iranian historiography, Persian literature, and anti-imperial politics over the course of the 1910s-1920s.