Azar Nafisi delivered a lecture titled "Women in Iran: Past, Present and Future" at the Library of Congress on March 16th in the James Madison Building. The event, sponsored by the Near East Section of the Library's African and Middle Eastern Division, was free and open to the public.

Born in Tehran, Iran, Nafisi was sent by her parents to England at the age of 13 to finish her studies. Upon completing her degree in English and American literature, she returned to a changed Iran after the 1979 revolution. She began teaching at the University of Tehran, where she struggled with the impact of the revolution while earning national and international recognition for her advocacy on behalf of Iran's intellectuals, youth and women. She was expelled from the university in 1981 for refusing to wear the mandatory Islamic veil and did not resume teaching until 1987. A decade later, she came to the United States, where she currently teaches culture and literature at the School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University.

For several years before leaving Iran, Nafisi gathered seven young women at her house every week to discuss forbidden works of Western literature. The experience is recounted in her recent book, "Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books" (Random House, 2003). The book is a personal account of the struggle for intellectual freedom in Iran before, during and after the revolution that brought Ayatollah Khomeini to power.