Ethnic and Religious Minority Politics in Contemporary Iran

Nayereh Tohidi is Professor of the Gender and Women's Studies Department at California State University, Northridge and a Research Associate at the Center for Near Eastern Studies at UCLA, where she has been coordinating the Bilingual Lecture Series on Iran since 2003. A native of Iran, Tohidi earned her BS (with Honors) from the University of Tehran in Psychology and Sociology and MA and Ph.D. from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Her teaching and research areas include sociology of gender, development, religion (Islam), ethnicity and democracy in the Middle East and post-Soviet Central Eurasia, especially Iran and the Azerbaijan Republic. She is the recipient of several fellowships and research awards, including a year of Fulbright lectureship and research at the Academy of Sciences of the Soviet Republic of Azerbaijan; post-doctoral fellowships at Harvard University;Stanford University; the Kennan Institute of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars; and the Keddie-Balzan Fellowship at the Center for Near Eastern Studies at UCLA. Prof. Tohidi has integrated her human/women's rights activism and community organizing with excellence in academic work and scholarship. Her publications include editorship or authorship of: Globalization, Gender and Religion: The Politics of Women's Rights in Catholic and Muslim Contexts; Women in Muslim Societies: Diversity within Unity; and Feminism, Democracy and Islamism in Iran. Tohidi has been a consultant for the United Nations (UNDP, UNICEF, ILO, and WIDER) on projects concerning gender and development.