Amir Hassanpour

Professor Amir Hassanpour (1943-2017) was a prominent Kurdish-Iranian Marxist Linguist and Professor Emeritus of Near and Middle Eastern Civilizations at the University of Toronto (UofT), where he taught from 1999 to 2009. His major research areas were Kurdish socio-linguistics, Kurdish history and nationalism, as well as peasant and social movements in the Middle East and Kurdistan. He was an influential intellectual and revolutionary thinker who advocated for Kurdish Studies and the rights of national minorities for self-determination. His wide-ranging research has left significant impacts in these areas.