Hyphen

Pardis Mahdavi is Dean of Social Sciences in The College of Liberal Arts and Sciences and a Professor in the School of Social Transformation at Arizona State University, USA. She is a non-fiction writer with 20 years of experience as an anthropologist, public health researcher, and expert in sexual politics across the globe. She is the author of five books, including the first book on the sexual politics of modern Iran, Passionate Uprisings: Iran’s Sexual Revolution (2008). A former journalist turned academic, she has written for Ms. Magazine, Foreign Affairs, The Conversation, The Huffington Post, Jaddaliyya, and The Los Angeles Times Magazine. Her work has been covered in documentaries, radio shows, podcasts, and media outlets, including CNN, PBS, NPR, and Publishers Weekly.

The hyphen, which may not technically qualify as a punctuation mark, because it operates at the level of the word rather than the sentence—it doesn’t make you pause (though it may give you pause)—has inspired not one great book but two: “Meet Mr. Hyphen (And Put Him in His Place),” a classic by Edward N. Teall, published in 1937, and “Hyphen,” by Pardis Mahdavi, which came out in 2021. Mahdavi, an Iranian-American (hyphen hers), was a dean at Arizona State University when she tackled this project, as part of a series for Bloomsbury Academic called Object Lessons, “about the hidden lives of ordinary things.”

• PrefacePart 1 Ancestors Worshipped1. My Big Fat Persian Wedding (Pardis)2. U-Hyphens3. Ancestors Hear My Prayers (Daniel)4. Hyphen Justification – Gutenberg and His Travails5. Lost in Migration (AdeChike)6. Like Water for Chocolate (Ania)Part 2 Hyphen as Divider7. Scolding Private Hyphen8. Pardis 9/119. Ade10. A Hyphen Set in Stone11. Dani12. Ania 2.0Part 3 The Death and Re-birth of the Hyphen(ated)13. Hyphen Thief On-The-Loose?14. The Big Moment15. The Big Game16. The Big Debate17. The Big Read18. The Big RevealAcknowledgmentsEndnotesIndex