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Lecture | LUCIS What's New?! Series

Getting on Famously: The Netherlands and the Shah of Iran

Date
Thursday 25 May 2023
Time
Explanation
Please register below
Series
What's New?! Spring Lecture Series 2023
Location
Lipsius
Cleveringaplaats 1
2311 BD Leiden
Room
2.06
Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi, Queen Juliana and Prince Bernhard

Anyone who follows the news about Iran today can hardly imagine that relations between the West and Iran were excellent until 1979. Also The Netherlands had close ties with Iran. the Dutch royal family frequented the Iranian court and Dutch companies did good business in Iran. Iran, often called Persia at the time, was seen as a mythical country with an ancient civilization and Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi as a visionary and reformer. In the 1970s, this romanticized image changed as word spread about repression in Iran. As the Dutch public turned against the shah, the Dutch government was put in an awkward position. Busy maintaining ties with Iran against the tide, it was taken by surprise when the Iranian Revolution came and brought a sudden end to the heydays of Dutch-Iranian relations.

About Maaike Warnaar

Who talks for Iran and to what effect? is the central question in Maaike Warnaar's research and teaching. Her research focuses on the dialogical relationship between foreign policy and cultural representation. It builds bridges between International Relations - a social science - and humanities-based studies of culture. In her course History of Contemporary Iran she and her students make sense of Iranian history 'as discourse', connecting it with power. During her Methodologies course, the ResMAs and PhDs in Area Studies engage in an ongoing conversation about methodological questions in the study of human society and culture.

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