Niloofar Sarlati is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Cultural Studies and Comparative Literature at the University of Minnesota, and a finalist in the LSA Collegiate Fellows Program at the University of Michigan.

Her talk explores how longstanding conventions of Persian courtesy became suspect indices of "primitive" (versus “civilized”) society in Western discourse and thus of a self-perceived “defective” modernity in early-twentieth-century Iran. She argues that transformations in the understanding of language, social interaction, and human life itself were articulated through discursive shifts in time-value, truth-value, and exchange-value that took shape in a broader dialogue between English and Persian in the long nineteenth century.