Amir Hassanpour

Amir Hassanpour, (1943- ), is a prominent Iranian Kurdish scholar and researcher. He was born in Mahabad, in north-western Iran. He received Bachelor of Arts (B.A.) degree in English language in 1964 from University of Tehran. He taught in the secondary schools of Mahabad in the period of 1965-66.
In 1968, he began studying linguistics at Tehran University, and received his M.A. in 1970. He finished his doctoral work in 1972, while teaching for a year at the University of Tehran. Then he went to the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where he studied communications and received his Ph.D. in 1989 in the field of sociolinguistics and contemporary Middle Eastern history. The title of his thesis is The language factor in national development: The standardization of the Kurdish language, 1918-1985. He has been living in Canada since 1986, and has been teaching at University of Windsor, Concordia University and University of Toronto. Currently, he is Associate Professor at the Department of Near and Middle Eastern Civilizations at the University of Toronto. His areas of interest for the course are media, conflict and democracy and critical approaches to nationalism, ethnic conflict, genocide and social movements.