Assistant Professor of Religion Ata Anzali has been awarded funding from the Roshan Cultural Heritage Institute in support of a research project titled, The Making of Modern “Mysticism” in Iran. As a Roshan Institute Fellow, Anzali will be spending his academic leave next year in Iran, carrying out research designed to shed light on some of the ways in which the process of modernity influenced the formation of religion and spirituality in Iran during the second half of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The Roshan Institute focuses on preservation, transmission and instruction of Persian culture.