Monireh Taliehbakhsh, a PhD candidate in Persian Literature (especially Mystical Literature) at Tarbiat Modares University, Iran is visiting the Center from September 2018 – March 2019. The theme of her research is the ontology of the mystical “I” in the Islamic mystical tradition. More specifically, she investigates how mysticism in the Abrahamic tradition begins with negativity, and how the mystic as a “subject” is formed on the basis of this negativity.