Fatemeh Sayyah: Twentieth-Century Iran’s Forgotten Scholar, Public Intellectual and Women’s Rights Advocate This presentation will focus on the previously unstudied life and intellectual contribution of Fatemeh Sayyah (1902-1947), Iran’s first female university professor and diplomat, as well as public intellectual and advocate of women’s rights. Despite her stellar accomplishments, Sayyah is marginally known in Iran and remains unknown in non-Persian scholarship. Iranian intellectual history is a new field, so far remaining preoccupied with male “master thinkers.” None of the few existing monographs on the subject pay serious attention to women’s intellectual contributions. Another reason for Sayyah’s marginalization appears to be to her affiliation with Iran’s communist (Tudeh) party. Moreover, Sayyah passed away at the young age of forty-five, just as she was becoming a noted national figure during the mid-century’s new political and intellectual contestations. Sayyah was born from Iranian parents in Russia, where she completed her education with a doctorate in European literature from Moscow University. Returning to Iran, she overcame opposition from the Ministry of Culture to become the country’s first female faculty at the newly established Tehran University (1937). She already had received intellectual recognition by defending the moral character of modern fiction in a public debate with Ahmad Kasravi, the country’s leading historian and nationalist thinker. In addition to her path-breaking academic career, she became the country’s first female diplomat by representing Iran at the annual meeting of the League of Nations in Geneva (1937). After the fall of Reza Shah’s dictatorship, Sayyah quickly emerged as the most articulate champion of Iranian women’s rights. She served as the general secretary of the Women’s Party, publishing its organ and launching a principled and carefully calibrated campaign for women’s enfranchisement. She also travelled to Turkey and France, where she was Iran’s only spokesperson in international cultural and political forums pertaining to women’s rights. She was the only female member of both Soviet and British cultural institutes in Tehran and presented papers at the celebrated First Congress of Iranian Writers in 1946. Going beyond a simple biography, my paper will analyze Sayyah’s intellectual contribution to the cultural and political context of 1930s-1940s Iran, as well as probing into the question of why this unique woman has been so grossly overlooked in mainstream Iranian historiography. The paper is based on new Persian archival material, in addition to the only existing collection of primary sources on Sayyah’s life and works.