Iranian poet Fatemeh Shams is a 2024 Greeley Peace Research Scholar at Lowell College. She will go to universities and lead free packages for the campus and group. (Courtesy of University of Massachusetts Lowell)
LOWELL — Iranian author, activist, and feminist scholar Fatemeh Shams has been named a 2024 Greeley Peace Research Scholar at Lowell College.
Shams is a poet and essayist whose management in Iran’s Green Movement in 2009 led to her and her household’s exile. She is an advocate for political change, structural justice, and gender equality, and her work advances the rights to bodily autonomy and mental freedom for ladies in Iran and Afghanistan.
As a 2024 Greeley Scholar, Shams will journey to Lowell College subsequent month to steer packages for the campus group, together with a nationwide “Day Without Violence” that showcases these beliefs.
She will even be a keynote speaker at free occasions open to the general public in Lowell and Boston. These packages embrace:
• Wednesday, March 20, 2 p.m. – Shams will learn poetry on the Lucy Parsons Center, 358 Center St. A., Jamaica Plain.
• Thursday, April 4, 9 a.m. – Shams shall be a featured speaker at a digital occasion hosted by the Greater Lowell Interfaith Leadership Alliance. Members of the general public who want to be part of the dialog on-line can go to uml.edu/GLILA-Shams.
• Tuesday, April 9, 10 a.m. – Massachusetts Lowell’s annual Day Without Violence options Shams’ presentation, “Revolutionary Girls and Iran,” in Allen House, 2 Solomont Way, Lowell, on the south facet of the college. The way forward for feminist resistance actions in Japan shall be featured. campus.
“Being chosen as this yr’s University of Massachusetts Lowell Greeley Peace Scholar is a really significant recognition and honor. Lowell has a protracted and wealthy historical past within the labor motion, and because the birthplace of the primary girls to work in unions. “It has turn into an emblem of inspiration and hope. For somebody who has devoted a good portion of his life to the pursuit of gender justice, this recognition is of immense pleasure and which means.” he stated. “While my area is affected by warfare and violence, being a Greeley Scholar stays my dedication to peace and nonviolent resistance. Through my contributions throughout this go to, I hope to proceed working laborious, particularly within the context of gender justice. We hope that we are able to additional enrich the dialogue on peacebuilding and resistance in Japan.”
Shams was born in Mashhad, Iran. There, her mom’s underground library impressed her love of literature and served as a protected haven from her nation’s conservative political and spiritual setting. At the age of 16, she gained a silver medal on the Iranian National Literary Olympics. Her poems and essays revealed the basic struggles of her time, together with oppression, sexual violence, self-determination, alienation, pressured migration, and the lack of her native language.
“We are thrilled to welcome Fatemeh Shams to the University of Massachusetts Lowell as a 2024 Greeley Scholar. This yr’s theme, ‘Imagining New Possibilities for Feminist and Queer Resistance,’ “In line, the Greeley Advisory Committee sought to establish students whose lives and work embody the transformative potential of those considerations,” stated Greeley Scholarship Chair Urmitapa Datta. Peace Research Committee and Associate Professor of Psychology on the University of Massachusetts Lowell. “Dr. Shams’ contribution highlights how feminism impacts a number of fields. We consider that college students and the general public will drastically profit from the insights she brings. .”
Greeley Scholars are chosen for his or her accomplishments as humanitarians and their efforts to advertise peace and battle decision on the native, regional, nationwide, or worldwide degree. With this honor, Shams joins a rising listing of distinguished previous recipients.
This honor is called for the late Rev. Dana McLean Greeley, a longtime Unitarian Universalist minister in Concord. The Greeley Scholars Program is funded by the Greeley Peace Research Fund, established by a present from the Dana McLean Greeley Peace and Justice Foundation and a present from the Commonwealth of Massachusetts by the Mass Foundation of Massachusetts. Additionally, this yr’s program is sponsored by the College of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences on the University of Massachusetts Lowell.
Established in 1966 by what was then often called the Peace Research Association, Day Without Violence is held on faculty campuses every April to honor the work and legacy of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. .