Michelle Quay is Lecturer of Persian at Brown and holds a doctorate in Asian & Middle Eastern Studies from Pembroke College, University of Cambridge. She also holds an M.A. from the University of California, Los Angeles, and is an alumna of the University of Chicago, where she received her B.A. with honors. Her research focuses on premodern Persian literature, particularly in the writings of Farid al-Din ‘Attar Nishapuri and other early Sufi mystics. Through her teaching, she enjoys helping students acquire the basics of Persian language and guiding them through the program to Advanced Persian language, literature, and culture courses.
In addition to her research and teaching work, Dr. Quay is deeply engaged in the field of literary translation. She is a co-editor of The Routledge Handbook of Persian Literary Translation (2022) and recently won the inaugural Mo Habib Translation Prize in Persian Literature in 2023. Her literary translation work has appeared in such publications as Words Without Borders, Asymptote Journal, World Literature Today, and others. Meanwhile, her prize-winning translation of Reza Ghassemi’s 1996 novel, Woodwind Harmony in the Nighttime is forthcoming from Deep Vellum in 2025.
Prior to joining Brown’s Center for Language Studies, Dr. Quay taught Persian Language and Literature at the University of Chicago and Columbia University. While at Columbia, she collaborated with the University of Birmingham GlobalLIT Project as a postdoctoral research fellow and translator. As part of this project on Middle Eastern literary theory, she was responsible for translating selections from medieval scholars of Persian rhetoric into English for GlobalLIT’s forthcoming anthology of Persian, Arabic, and Turkish balāghat texts.
Dr. Quay is committed to developing Persian language pedagogy, and has previously served as an executive board member of the American Association of Teachers of Persian. She has recently co-written a chapter in the Routledge Handbook of Second Language Acquisition and Pedagogy of Persian on the Communicative Approach to Persian language teaching with her colleague Dr. Latifeh Hagigi. Her interest in Persian was sparked at a young age growing up in Southern California’s ‘Tehrangeles,’ the largest Persian-speaking diaspora community in the United States.
