2017 Election

Camron Michael Amin joined the History faculty at the University of Michigan-Dearborn in 1997.. He currently serves as the History Discipline Representative, Coordinator of the Middle East Studies Certificate Program, CASL Representative to the Office of Research and Sponsored Projects Governing Board, Principal Investigator for the Michigan Iranian American Oral History Project and Program Chair for the 2018 Association for Iranian Studies Conference. His most recent publication is  2017. "Gender, Madness, Religion, and Iranian-American Identity: Observations on a 2006 Murder Trial in Williamsport, Pennsylvania." Soc. Sci. 6, no. 3: 85. (http://www.mdpi.com/2076-0760/6/3/85).  His CV and list of other recent publications may be found at his faculty website.  

Sussan Siavoshi received her B.S. in economics from Pahlavi University in Shiraz, and her Ph.D. in political science from Ohio State University. She is the Cox Chapman Distinguished Professor of Political Science at Trinity University.
She is the author of Montazeri: The Life and Though of Iran’s Revolutionary Ayatollah, and Liberal Nationalism in Iran: the Failure of a Movement. The latter book has been translated into Persian.
She has written several articles on contemporary Iranian politics ranging from studies on factionalism of the elite, to behavior and philosophical outlooks of Iranian political elite, to Islamic feminism, to film and literature in post-revolutionary Iran.

Orkideh Behrouzan is a physician, medical anthropologist, and the author of Prozak Diaries: Psychiatry and Generational Memory in Iran (2016, Stanford).  Behrouzan received her PhD in History and Anthropology of Science and Technology from Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Before joining SOAS in 2017, she was assistant professor of anthropology at the Department of Global Health and Social Medicine (GHSM) at King’s College London, and prior to that, at the Institute for the Medical Humanities (IMH) at University of Texas. Behrouzan is a 2015-16 fellow of the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) and the winner of the 2011 Kerr Award from the Middle Eastern Studies Association. As a consultant in areas of health and conflict, she served as expert adviser for Medact’s Health Impact Assessment (HIA) report on the health consequence of the Iran-Iraq war (1980-1988). She is also a poet and storyteller in Persian and English (http://orkidehbehrouzan.com/).
Her monograph Prozāk Diaries is an ethnographic analysis of psychiatric discourses in post-1980s Iran. Asking how psychiatric dialect became a language of everyday, Behrouzan analyses the cultural, generational, and political meaning of medicalisation in various sites from clinical encounters to intimate interviews, works of art, media, and Persian blogs. Combining anthropological and psychoanalytical frameworks, the book is an interdisciplinary exploration of language and memory among youth in the aftermath of the 1979 Revolution and theIran-Iraq War. Investigating the grey areas between individual symptoms and generational remembering, the book reveals how historical experiences are negotiated and how particular generational identifications are formed.

Mehrzad Boroujerdi is Professor of Political Science and O’Hanley Faculty Scholar at Syracuse University. He is currently a Fellow of the American Council on Education in residence at California State University, Northridge as well as a visiting scholar at UCLA’s Center for Near Eastern Studies.
Dr. Boroujerdi’s research centers on intellectual and political history of modern Iran. He is the author of Iranian Intellectuals and the West: The Tormented Triumph of Nativism(1996), I Carved, Worshiped and Shattered: Essays on Iranian Politics and Identity [in Persian] (2010), and Post-Revolutionary Iran: A Handbook (forthcoming from Syracuse University Press). He is the author of numerous journal articles and book chapters in English and Persian and edited Mirror for the Muslim Prince: Islam and Theory of Statecraft(2013).
Dr. Boroujerdi has been a postdoctoral Fellow and a Rockefeller Foundation Fellow at Harvard University and University of Texas at Austin. In addition, he has served as the editor of the Modern Intellectual and Political History of the Middle East book series published by Syracuse University Press (1996-2014), the book review editor of the International Journal of Middle East Studies (2002-2007), and a principal investigator of the Iran Data Portal. Dr. Boroujerdi has also been a non-resident Scholar at the Middle East Institute in Washington, D.C (2005-2016), and President of the International Society for Iranian Studies (2012-2014).

Naghmeh Sohrabi is the Charles (Corky) Goodman Professor of Middle East History and the Associate Director for Research at the Crown Center for Middle East Studies at Brandeis University. She is the author of Taken for Wonder: Nineteenth Century Travel Accounts from Iran to Europe (Oxford University Press, 2012) and numerous articles on modern Iranian history, culture and politics. She is the 2017-18 co-recipient of a Mellon-Sawyer Seminar for a year long study of 20th century revolutions in the Middle East, Latin America, and the Caribbean, and the 2014-15 recipient of a Mellon New Directions Fellowship. Sohrabi is currently writing a book on 1970s Iran and the experience of the 1979 revolution tentatively titled "What Everyone Knew: Untold Histories of the Iranian Revolution." She received her PhD in History and Middle East Studies from Harvard University in 2005, and her dissertation received an honorable mention from the Foundation for Iranian Studies.

Farzin Vejdani received his BA from McGill University (2001) and his PhD from Yale University (2009). He is currently Assistant Professor of History at Ryerson University. His book-length manuscript on Iranian nationalist historiography, Making History in Iran: Education, Nationalism, and Print Culture, was published by Stanford University Press in 2014. It received an Honorable Mention for the Houshang Pourshariati Iranian Studies Book Award in 2016. Dr. Vejdani is also the co-editor of Iran Facing Others: Identity Boundaries in a Historical Perspective (2012). In addition to being the author of two book chapters, he has published numerous articles.

I was born in Washington, DC. After graduating Johns Hopkins University, I served for three years in the U.S. Army as an officer. During that time, I deployed once to Afghanistan. I received my masters from the University of Oklahoma and wrote my thesis on the Iranian Constitutional Revolution. While at OU, I served as the co-editor of Danesh, the journal for undergraduate Iranian Studies. I’m currently a PhD student in the UT Austin History Department. My primary area of study is the Allied occupation of Iran during World War Two. My time in the Army and as a TA has taught me I love to teach and I’m trying to broaden my knowledge of teaching pedagogy. I’m also interested in digital humanities techniques, specifically OCR technology and distance reading.

Beeta Baghoolizadeh is a Ph.D. Candidate in History at the University of Pennsylvania, where she is writing her dissertation, Seeing Race and Erasing Slavery: Media and the Construction of Blackness in Iran, 1840-1960. Beeta received an SSRC International Dissertation Research Fellowship in 2015-2016. She graduated summa cum laude from UCLA and holds a Master’s degree in Middle Eastern Studies from UT Austin. Beeta also serves as an editor at Ajam Media Collective, an online space for issues pertaining to the Persianate world and its diaspora.