Obituaries

Deirdre Eberly Lashgari, Professor Emerita of English at California State Polytechnic University, Pomona, died August 16, 2014 in Los Angeles. A specialist in ethnic and world literatures, Lashgari translated both classical and modern Iranian poetry, and wrote, published, and lectured on Iranian fiction and film as well as on women writers of fiction and poetry in Iran, China, India, Ghana, and the United States. At UC Berkeley in the sixties, she studied Farsi, Arabic, and French, and worked to translate unknown women’s poetry into English.  

In 1969, she spent a year in Iran on a Fulbright Fellowship studying Western and folk influences on modern Iranian poetry, as well as women’s changing roles in urban and village life. Upon her return to Berkeley, she invited others to join in an ambitious translation project. Circles of foreign language students began to gather regularly, entertaining each other at ongoing poetry-potlucks, which Lashgari and her colleague Doris Earnshaw organized to locate, translate, and anthologize women’s poetry from diverse languages. With her collaborators (Bankier and Earnshaw, et.al.), Deirdre Lashgari edited two international anthologies of poetry, The Other Voice: Women’s Poetry in Translation (Norton, 1976) and Women Poets of The World (Macmillan, 1983). She also edited and contributed to a volume of essays on women writers with the University Press of Virginia (1995) Violence, Silence, and Anger Women’s Writing as Transgression. The story of Lashagari’s collectivist work is told in The Berkeley Literary Women’s Revolution: essays from Marsha’s salon (McFarland 2004). Lashgari also taught English at Sonoma State University, Mills College in Oakland, San Francisco State University. Always a galvanizing presence in innovative education, she taught at UC Berkeley in the Peace and Conflict Studies Program, and the experimental undergraduate seminar program Strawberry Creek College, as well as the first courses on women’s literature in Comparative Literature Department. Her pioneering research and collaborative work contributed to changing forever the literary curriculum at Berkeley and other American universities, and to normalize the presence of women’s writing as part of the syllabus.