Moayyad organized major conferences at the university on the Indo-Persian poet Amir Khosrow (died 1325) and on the poet Parvin Etesâmi (died 1941), as well as the first academic conference about “The Baha'i [sic] Faith and Islam” in 1984 at McGill University in Montreal.
[2] Heshmat Moayyad was born in 1927 in Hamadan, Iran to a Baháʼí family who had Iranian Jewish origins.
[3] After completing his undergraduate studies in Persian and Arabic Literature at the University of Tehran,[1] he went to Tübingen in 1951 to learn German, and by the end of 1952 was studying Orientalistics and German Literature for his PhD with Hellmut Ritter at the Johann Wolfgang Goethe-Universität Frankfurt am Main.
[1] In 1948, he interrupted his education with a year of service—travel throughout Iran to work with small Baha'i communities, which resulted in a travelogue published in 2015.
[3] The Heshmat Moayyad Lecture Series in Persian Literature and Culture—to honor his work—was inaugurated by the University of Chicago's Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations (NELC) in 2018.