Mahnaz Yousefzadeh is professor of Global Liberal Studies, affiliate professor of Italian and affiliate professor of art history at NYU Abu Dhabi. She is the author of City and Nation in Italian Unification (Palgrave Macmillan 2011), Florence’s Embassy to the Sultan of Egypt (Palgrave, 2019), and articles on the relation of aesthetics and politics in European nation-building, as well as early modern relations between Italy and the Islamic and Perianate worlds. Her current projects – one academic and the other a creative non-fiction – trace the encounters between traditions through the movement of people, artifacts, and images. Her scholarly book project is on Florence’s relation to Persia in the 16th century. Mahnaz’s creative non-fiction is similarly concerned with recovering ethical voices and meanings by revisiting as translator, mediator, and the traveler, the experience of her migration from and return to Iran after decades of living in the west.