Season 2, Ep.9- Mehdy Sedaghat Payam: Experimental literature and digital literature

January 29 2024


In this episode of the fly-bottle podcast, Amirali Shams talks to Mehdy Sedaghat Payam. He started his education in English literature in Iran and received his Master's from the University of Tehran. After learning about experimental and digital literature he decided to continue his education in New Zealand, where he received his Ph.D. in experimental print fiction and digital literature from Victoria University of Wellington in 2014. In order to introduce digital humanities in the Iranian context, he translated a book about it which was published in 2018 by SAMT Publications. When he was translating that book he realized that he needed to gain more expertise to apply quantitative methods for literary analysis of the pre-modern Persian texts. Therefore he decided to come to the University of Maryland where world-famous scholars in digital humanities and Persian literature have already started the Persian digital humanities project. 


Mehdy Sedaghat Payam is an author, translator, and researcher in digital literature and digital humanities. Mehdy is a published novelist and his first novel, The Secret of Silence, or Hamlet According to Shakespeare’s Sister was published by Morvarid Publications in 2009. He also translated some works from postmodernist authors like John Barth and Kurt Vonnegut in Farsi. He is now a PhD researcher in Persian digital humanities at the University of Maryland. 


Amirali Shams graduated in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Waterloo in 2021. He has a passion for modern history and literature of Iran.


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Sound: Niusha Imani, Behdad Chalaki

Music: Reza Nadri

Cover art: Pouya Fatoureh-chi

Content Editor: Amirali Shams

Produced by Yeganeh Khazaei in the Flybottle Podcast