“I love teaching because I’ve been a student all my life,” said associate professor Amir Hassanpour. “My teachers have played a very important role in my own personal development and they changed the course of my life because they changed my way of thinking.”

Hassanpour’s attitude towards teaching is a main reason he has become so popular among the students of the Near and Middle Eastern Civilizations department.

“I try to make teaching as interactive as possible,” he said.

His teaching style, which he describes as “a two-way process” where he says he “can learn as much from listening to my students as they can from listening to my lectures” has led to his being recognized by Maclean’s magazine as one of Canada’s top professors for the second consecutive year.

This hasn’t gone to his head, however.

“I think everyone would be interested in getting some positive feedback and recognition from their colleagues and their community,” he said modestly. He has also been nominated by students and colleagues for the Dean’s award for excellence in teaching. A campaign for him by his department is currently in full swing.

His broad educational background has contributed to a multi-disciplinary approach to teaching. He has studied economics, English literature, linguistics, communications, and Near Eastern studies in Iran, the U.S., Canada, and Europe, and still conducts research on all those topics.

“Unfortunately the world of academia has people only interested in one particular field, but I’m not. I can’t be interested in only one thing because there’s so much out there and I enjoy studying the relationships between phenomena,” he explained. If he had to narrow it down, however, Hassanpour says his expertise lies in “the modern Middle East and communications.”

Some of the many projects Hassanpour is currently working on include research on popular media in the Middle East, a bibliography of Kurdish women’s studies, a four decade-long study of the tertiary economic history of Mokri Kurdistan to which he is a contributor, and journalistic writing for Kurdish and Farsi language newspapers in Iran and Iraq. He confesses that journalism holds much interest for him.

“I would like to write more articles and take on less academic projects. Media has had a profound impact on human societies since the beginning of writing,” he said, passionately launching into a mini-comparison of Middle Eastern and Western cultures through history.

“The Middle East was the birthplace of writing, the urban revolution, and many other trends in intellectual and philosophical thought and development throughout history.

“But…radical changes in the 19th and 20th centuries in communications technologies like photography, the telephone, wireless telegraphy, radio, motion pictures, television and satellites all occurred in Northern and Western countries and were exported to the Middle East.

“Understanding the impact of new communications technologies on societies also helps us to understand the relationships between these two parts of the world, because communications technologies now shape every aspect of our lives.”

He began his teaching career in the 1960s in his native Iran at Tehran University. By 1987 he found his way over to the University of Windsor. He would later teach at Concordia University in Montreal before settling at U of T in 1997.

In 1999 he began teaching at the NMC department initially as a research associate. He currently teaches two courses, Theory and Method in Middle Eastern studies, and Nationalism in the Middle East.

One of Hassanpour’s major interests outside his research is to support and encourage student activism. Several U of T clubs, including the Arab Student Collective (ASC), feel that his encouragement has been instrumental in their development.

“Of all the faculty members at U of T, Professor Hassanpour has been among the most supportive of the ASC since it was started,” ASC member Hazem Jamjoum wrote in an email. “He has consistently given his advice (and constructive criticism) at every opportunity.”

Hassanpour is himself an activist, and was among the professors who spearheaded a petition, signed by 120 U of T faculty members, to protest a lecture by Campus Watch leader Dr. Daniel Pipes last year.

“Campus Watch has engaged in acts of espionage on academics all over North America,” said Hassanpour. “They used to have a list on their website of academics that were critical of U.S. and Israeli foreign policy” and who were “watched” by Pipes and his followers.

“This kind of activism is violating not only the framework for critical thinking but also academic freedom and university autonomy. The universities should be free environments where students and professors can critique and discuss anything, and I mean anything.”