2012 Election

Firuza Abdullaeva is a graduate (BA, MA honour) of the Faculty of African and Oriental Studies, St Petersburg University, where she received her PhD in Iranian philology, Art and Islamic Studies in 1989. She was an Associate Professor at the University of St Petersburg when in 2005 she moved to Oxford as Lecturer in Persian Literature at the University of Oxford and Tutorial Fellow and Keeper of the Firdousi Library of Wadham College, where she was teaching until 2010. In 2002 she joined the Cambridge Shahnama Project after a term at the Institute for Advanced Study (Princeton) and a term at the University of Michigan (Ann Arbor) as a Fulbright Professor. Currently (since 2010) she is in Cambridge as Head of the Cambridge Shahnama Centre, Pembroke College, University of Cambridge. Among her research interests are Persian literature, mediaeval book art and codicology, Persian-Russian diplomacy of the Qajar period, Russian, Soviet and post-Soviet cultural Orientalism (including literature, visual art, cinema, music, opera and ballet) in Iran and Central Asia.

Roham Alvandi is a Lecturer in International History at the London School of Economics and Political Science, where his research and teaching focuses on Iran’s diplomatic history and the international history of the Persian Gulf. He completed his doctorate at the University of Oxford on ‘Nixon, Kissinger and the Shah: US-Iran relations and the Cold War’, which was awarded the 2011 Foundation for Iranian Studies Dissertation Prize as well as the 2011 Pavry Memorial Prize by the University of Oxford. His recent publications include 'Nixon, Kissinger, and the Shah: The Origins of Iranian Primacy in the Persian Gulf', Diplomatic History, 36/2 (2012): 337-372 and 'Muhammad Reza Pahlavi and the Bahrain Question, 1968-1970', British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies, 37/2 (2010): 159-177. He has been a Visiting Fellow at the Centre for Graduate International Studies at the University of Tehran and served on the editorial team of Iranian Studies for the past four years as Book Reviews Editor (History) and then Assistant Editor (History).

Sabri Ates is an Assistant Professor of History at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas. He received his PhD in 2006 from theDepartments of History and Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies at New York University. In 2006, his dissertation was co-winner of the Middle Eastern Studies Association’s Dissertation Prize in the Humanities. A thoroughly revised and expanded version of this dissertation Ottoman-Iranian Borderland: Making a Boundary, 1843-1914 is forthcoming with Cambridge University Press. Currently he is working on a book length projec! t on Sheikh Ubeidullah rebellion of 1880-1881. He has published a book in Turkish entitled Tunalı Hilmi Bey: An Intellectual from the Ottoman Empire to Modern Turkey (Istanbul: Tarih Vakfı Yurt Yayınları, 2009). The book studies the Ottoman constitutionalist movement and early Turkish Republic through the life and works of the Young Turk intellectual, Tunalı Hilmi Bey. Ates has also published articles in Comparative Studies of Asia, Africa and the Middle East and Iranian Studies.

Maziar Behrooz was born in Tehran-Iran. He received his B.A degree in History-Government from Saint Mary College of California (1982), his M.A. in Modern History of Europe from San Francisco State University (1986), and his Ph.D. in Modern History of the Near East from University of California, Los Angeles (1993). He has taught at UC Berkeley, Saint Mary's College of California, Stanford University, Bridgewater State College and is currently an associate professor at the History Department of San Francisco State University. He has authored numerous articles and book chapters on Iran and is the author of two books on the history of Iranian left movement. His first book is Rebels with a Cause (1999), which has been translated into Persian (2001) and Turkish (2006). His second book is Perspectives on the History of Rebels with a Cause in Iran (2006) which is a collection of articles and interviews on the left movement in Iran, translated and published in Iran and in Persian. 

Touraj Daryaee is the Howard C. Baskerville Professor in the History of Iran and the Persiante World and the Associate Director of the Dr. Samuel M. Jordan Center for Persian Studies and Culture at the University of California, Irvine. He received his BA from CSU Fullerton, MA and PhD from UCLA. He has taught at UCLA, CSU Fullerton and UC Irvine. His interests are mainly in ancient and early Medieval Iran, but also focus on the impact of the past on modern Iranian history. He is the editor of the International Journal of Ancient Iranian Studies published by Iran University Press. He also serves on the editorial boards of journals in Iran, Italy, Poland and the US. His works include The Oxford History of Iran, ed. T. Daryaee, Oxford University Press, 2012; Sasanian Persia: The Rise and Fall of an Empire, I.B. Tauris, London, 2009; Sasanian Iran (224-651 CE): Scholars & Humanists: Iranian Studies in Henning and Taqizadeh Correspondences 1937-1966, in collaboration with Iraj Afshar, Mazda Publishers, 2009.

Massumeh Farhad joined the Freer Gallery of Art/Arthur M. Sackler Gallery in 1995 as Associate Curator of Islamic Art. In 2004, she was appointed Chief Curator and Curator of Islamic Art. She is a specialist in the arts of the book from sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Iran. Farhad has curated numerous exhibitions on the arts of the Islamic world at the Freer and Sackler, including Art of the Persian Courts (1996), Fountains of Light: The Nuhad Es-Said Collection of Metalwork (2000), Style and Status: Imperial Costumes from Ottoman Turkey (2005-6), Tsars and the East: Gifts from Turkey and Iran in the Moscow Kremlin (2009), and Falnama: The Book of Omens (2009). She received her B.A. from Wellesley College (1978) and her Ph.D. in Islamic Art History from Harvard University in 1987. She has written extensively on seventeenth-century Persian painting, including Slaves of the Shah: New Elites in Safavid Iran (2004) and Falnama: The Book of Omens (2009).

Kazuo Morimoto is Associate Professor of Islamic and Iranian History at the Institute for Advanced Studies on Asia, University of Tokyo (PhD: The University of Tokyo, 2004). Morimoto’s main research interest lies in the role and position of the kinsfolk of the Prophet Muhammad in Iran and in other Muslim societies. His publications in this area include The Guardian of the Authenticity: Genealogy of the Prophet’s Family in Medieval Islam (ongoing book manuscript); Sayyids and Sharifs in Muslim Societies: The Living Links to the Prophet (edited volume; Routledge, 2012), and The Holy Family of Islam: The Kinsfolk of Muhammad (in Japanese; Tokyo, 2010). Morimoto is the Assistant Editor of the journals Orient and Oriento (in Japanese), published by the Society for Near Eastern Studies in Japan, and a member of the Board of Trustees, Japan Association for Middle East Studies. Morimoto served as a member of the Program Committee for the Eighth Biennial AIS Conference (2010). He is a winner of the 2008 Farabi Humanities and Islamic Studies International Award.

Kishwar Rizvi is an historian of Islamic Art and Architecture. She has written on representations of religious and imperial authority in Safavid Iran, as well as on issues of gender, nationalism and religious identity in modern Iran and Pakistan. She is the author of The Safavid Dynastic Shrine: History, religion and architecture in early modern Iran (London: British Institute for Persian Studies, I. B. Tauris, 2011) and editor of Modernism and the Middle East: Architecture and politics in the twentieth century (University of Washington Press, 2008). She is the recipient of an Alexander von Humboldt Award, the results of which have been recently published as “The Suggestive Portrait of Shah ‘Abbas: Prayer and likeness in a 1605 Safavid Shahnama (Book of Kings),” The Art Bulletin 94/2, (June, 2012).  She is completing a new book, The Transnational Mosque: Architecture and mobility in the contemporary Middle East (University of North Carolina Press), for which she was selected as a Carnegie Foundation Scholar.

Farzin Vejdani’s research interests broadly cover late nineteenth and early twentieth-century Iranian intellectual and cultural history, including Turco-Iranian cultural relations, the development of language policy and folklore studies in late Qajar and early Pahlavi Iran, and Iranian nationalist historiography. He is currently working on his manuscript "Purveyors of the Past: Education, Publics and the Writing of History in Iran, 1860-1940" that examines early twentieth-century Iranian historians' social backgrounds, collaborative and patronage networks, and institutional settings. He pays particular attention to history textbooks and school curricula as mediums for circulating nationalist grand narratives. Vejdani currently teaches courses on the history of Muslim societies, modern Iran and the cultural history of the modern Middle East. He is the co-editor of the volume Iran Facing Others: Iranian Identity Boundaries in a Historical Perspective (2012).His recent publications include “Crafting Constitutional Narratives: Iranian and Young Turk Solidarity 1907-1909” (2010) and “Appropriating the Masses: Folklore Studies, Ethnography, and Interwar Iranian Nationalism” (2012).

Valentine M. Moghadam joined Northeastern University in Boston as Director of the International Affairs Program, and Professor of Sociology, in January 2012. She was previously at Purdue University. Born in Tehran, Iran, Dr. Moghadam received her higher education in Canada and the U.S. In addition to her academic career, she has been a senior research fellow at UNU/WIDER in Helsinki, Finland (1990-95), and a section chief at UNESCO in Paris (2004-06). Dr. Moghadam began her scholarly career with a focus on Iranian development, political economy, women’s employment, and the revolution, and then studied revolution and women’s rights in Afghanistan. In more recent years she has researched and published in the areas of globalization, transnational feminist networks, civil society and citizenship, and gender in the Middle East and North Africa. Among her many publications are Modernizing Women: Gender and Social Change in the Middle East (1993, 2003, third edition expected in 2013), Globalizing Women: Transnational Feminist Networks (2005, which won the American Political Science Association’s Victoria Schuck Award), and Globalization and Social Movements: Islamism, Feminism, and the Global Justice Movement (2009, updated second edition 2012). She has edited seven books, among them Social Policy in the Middle East: Economic, Political, and Gender Dynamics (Palgrave Macmillan, 2006, co-edited with Massoud Karshenas). Dr. Moghadam has been involved with Iranian Studies since the early 1980s, has published in Iranian Studies, and was a founding member of the Center for Iranian Research and Analysis (CIRA). She is also active in the Middle East Studies Association and the American Sociological Association.

Touraj Atabaki is the head of the Middle East and Central Asia Desk at the International Institute of Social History. He also holds the chair of the Social History of the Middle East and Central Asia at Leiden University. His first studies were on theoretical physics followed by history. He is the author of Azerbaijan: Ethnicity and the Struggle for Powers in Iran (London: I.B. Tauris, 1993), of Beyond Essentialism. Who writes whose Past in the Middle East and Central Asia? (Amsterdam: Aksant, 2003), co-editor, with Erik Jan Zürcher, of Men of Order, Authoritarian Modernisation in Turkey and Iran (London: I.B. Tauris, 2004) and co-editor, with Sanjyot Mehendale, of Central Asia and the Caucasus: Transnationalism and Diaspora (London and New York: Routledge, 2005), Iran and the First World War: Battleground of the Great Powers (London: I.B. Tauris, 2006), The State and the subaltern: Society and Politics in Turkey and Iran (London: I.B. Tauris, 2007), Iran in the Twentieth Century. Historiography and Political Culture (London: I.B. Tauris, 2009), Modernity and its Agencies. Young Movements in the History of the South (New Delhi: Manohar, 2010) and Atabaki, T. & Brockett, G. D. (Eds.) Ottoman and Labour History (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010). Atabaki is the coordinator of a five year research project on a hundred years of the social history of labour in the Iranian oil industry, funded by the Netherlands for Scientific Research. His current work focuses on historiography of everyday life and comparative labor and subaltern history in Iran and former Soviet south.

Amy Malek is a PhD candidate in Sociocultural Anthropology at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). Her primary interests are in diaspora, cultural production, and visual culture, with a particular emphasis on Iranian diaspora communities in North America and Europe. Ms. Malek's dissertation research is an examination of cultural production among Iranian communities in Canada, Sweden, and the United States, with attention to the influences of cultural politics and multiculturalism in local diasporic spaces. She holds an M.A. in Anthropology from UCLA and an M.A. in Near Eastern Studies from NYU, where she was a MacCracken Fellow. She graduated summa cum laude from Emory University with a B.A. in Middle Eastern Studies and International Studies. Ms. Malek curated an exhibition of Iranian-American documentary photography entitled "DOCUMENT: Iranian Americans in L.A.", which exhibited at the Fowler Museum in Los Angeles in summer 2010. She has worked with Iranian-American organizations for nearly a decade and recently served as director of the 2012 IAAB International Conference on the Iranian Diaspora at UCLA.

Marian E. Smith is a first year PhD student in the Department of Near Eastern Studies at the University of Michigan, where she focuses on medieval and early modern Iranian cultural history. More specifically, she is interested in the culture of artistic production and literacy under the Timurid and Safavid dynasties, the movement of artists and materials, and the role of book arts and manuscript production in the service of dynastic aims. At Michigan, she has had the pleasure of working first-hand with manuscripts from these periods. Her other research interests include early Soviet historiographies of Iran and Central Asia, Persian court poetry, and the intersection of word and image in Persian illustrated manuscripts. She graduated from Mount Holyoke College in 2009 with a Bachelor’s degree in Asian Studies and this past year, received a Master’s degree in Middle Eastern Studies from Harvard University. At Harvard, she wrote a thesis exploring the intersection of poetry and art objects in the late Timurid period.