2026 Election

Dear AIS members,
It is a great honour to present my candidacy for the Council of the Association for Iranian Studies. I am a social historian of religion and science specializing in the early modern Persianate world and modern Iran. I received my Ph.D. from the Department for the Study of Religion at the University of Toronto and am currently a Visiting Assistant Professor at Bryn Mawr College. Previously, I held a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship at the Society of Fellows in the Humanities (Wolf Humanities Center) at the University of Pennsylvania and an SSHRC Postdoctoral Fellowship at McGill University. I also served as a lecturer at the University of British Columbia. My dissertation, “Iranian Calendric Modernity,” draws on extensive archival research in Iran and examines the historical development of the Hijrī-Shamsī calendar. It received an Honourable Mention for the AIS Best Dissertation Award in 2022, an achievement of which I am especially proud.

My current book project, Persianate Time: Calendars, Science, and the Temporal Foundations of Iranian Nationalism, examines transformations in conceptions of time and scientific knowledge in the early modern Persianate world and modern Iran. My research has also led me to digital humanities, particularly to preserve, organize, and make Persian-language historical materials more accessible. With support from a Persian Heritage Foundation (PHF) grant in digital humanities, I have worked with the private papers of Arthur Chester Millspaugh to explore the potential of digital methods for Iranian Studies. As an early-career scholar in Iranian Studies, I have experienced both the intellectual richness of our field and some of the challenges facing a new generation of scholars. If elected to the AIS Council, I would therefore be particularly committed to three areas.
First, I would work to bring greater attention to digital humanities within Iranian Studies. Digital methods are creating new possibilities for preserving sources, building archives and datasets, and asking new questions of Persian-language materials. I would like to explore the establishment of a digital humanities committee or initiative within AIS that could connect scholars working with these methods, facilitate the exchange of knowledge and resources, and make digital tools more accessible to members of our field.
Second, I would advocate for stronger dialogue between senior and junior scholars about the challenges facing emerging researchers. One of the most difficult transitions for many junior scholars is moving from the dissertation to a first book while navigating limited institutional resources and an increasingly challenging academic job market. I would like to help build closer connections between generations of AIS scholars through mentorship initiatives, particularly around developing and publishing a first book.
Finally, I would seek to broaden opportunities for scholars and intellectual communities inside Iran to participate in the conversations that shape our field and to ensure that their perspectives are represented in scholarly discussions about this consequential moment in Iran. Institutional, political, and geographic barriers can make sustained scholarly exchange difficult, particularly for researchers working in the country. I believe AIS can play an important role in strengthening connections among scholars working in different institutional and geographic contexts and in ensuring that Iranian Studies benefits from a wider range of perspectives and scholarly experiences.

Having studied and worked across Iran, Canada, and the United States, I have come to value Iranian Studies as an international and interdisciplinary scholarly community. It would be a privilege to serve on the AIS Council and to contribute to an association that supports emerging scholars, embraces new methodologies, and strengthens intellectual connections among scholars of Iran wherever they live and work.

It would be a privilege to serve on the Council of the Association for Iranian Studies. I have been a member of AIS for several years and value its role in bringing together scholars of Iran across disciplines and regions.

I am an intellectual and cultural historian of modern Iran. My research projects examine modernity through translation, the histories of gender and cultural production, and the relationship between science, technology, and politics. I am currently completing a book manuscript centered on the recurring figure of the Westernized dandy—variously named and reimagined by critics over the twentieth century—whom I theorize as a “performative translator” of modernity. Drawing on political and literary writing, the press, and popular culture, the book examines the politics of translation and its role in shaping debates over modernity in Iran, particularly around science, technology, and political institutions.

After completing my PhD, I collaborated with social scientists at Northwestern University on the politics of science, technology, higher education, and student activism in 1960s and 1970s Iran. While based in Germany, I took part in organizing panels and talks that brought together scholars from different disciplines working on Iran, Egypt, Turkey, and Germany. At Deep Springs College, a small, self-governing community in which students, faculty, and staff live and work together, I served on the Applications Committee and on search committees for the college president and for the chair in the natural sciences. These experiences have shaped my belief that a good academic life depends on sustaining intellectual communities in which people think through questions together and support one another’s intellectual development.

On the Council, I would work with fellow members to strengthen exchange between the humanities and social sciences and across academic communities in Iran, the United States, Europe, and beyond. Cross-disciplinary roundtables and workshops could provide one concrete forum for this exchange. I would also like to help build stronger mentorship and support networks for graduate students and early-career scholars. Another priority would be to help AIS circulate scholarship on Iran more widely within the field and create more accessible ways for broader publics to engage with it, including through short, public-facing discussions of research.

At a time of war and heightened political repression, both of which place mounting pressure on universities and scholars, AIS can offer a critical space for sustained conversation about the role scholars of Iran might play in public debate. This role has been understood and imagined in many ways, and I believe the field benefits from acknowledging these differences and bringing them into direct and rigorous intellectual exchange. The Association could also help foster peer networks, such as small discussion groups or informal virtual gatherings, for scholars affected by these crises in their work, their own lives, or their communities.
I would welcome the opportunity to serve the Association and contribute to its work.

It is a great honor to be nominated for the AIS Council. I am Professor in the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences at Tokyo Metropolitan University, where I also serve as Director of the International Exchange Division, and a Researcher at the Toyo Bunko in Tokyo.

I was born in Japan, a country whose ties with the Iranian world reach back to antiquity, and I received my academic training at the University of Tokyo (Ph.D., 2006). For more than two decades I have worked as a historian of the Middle East and Central Eurasia, focusing on Safavid Iran and its relations with the Caucasus. Reading Persian chronicles alongside Georgian sources, I have studied the Caucasian elites who served the Safavid court and the multilingual families who moved between empires. My books have appeared in Japanese, in Persian (Tehran, 2018) and in Georgian (Tbilisi, 2008), and my English-language work includes chapters in The Safavid World, The Persianate World and Iran and the World in the Safavid Age, articles in Studia Iranica and the Journal of Persianate Studies, and entries in Encyclopaedia Iranica. I presented at the Sixth Biennial Iranian Studies Conference (SOAS, 2006), have given invited presentations at the University of Michigan (2008), Stanford University (2011) and Yale University (2014), and have held visiting positions at Princeton, UC Berkeley, and institutes of Oriental studies in Moscow and Tbilisi.

I am standing for the Council for two main reasons.

First, I wish to contribute to the global development of Iranian Studies, in three directions. In Japan, there is a long and rich tradition of Iranian and Persian studies, much of it published only in Japanese; I would like to bring this scholarship and its younger practitioners into closer dialogue with AIS. Across East Asia, interest in Iran and the Persianate world is growing, and AIS can become a natural home for scholars in the region. In Eastern Europe, the Caucasus and Central Asia, regions historically intertwined with Iran, colleagues often work in languages and scholarly traditions that are not always visible in international forums. Through my long-standing ties with institutions in Tbilisi and beyond, I hope to help connect these communities with the Association.

Second, I wish to highlight the diversity of Iranian Studies as a way of deepening it as a discipline. The history of Iran was shaped by many peoples and many languages: Georgians, Armenians and others served at the Safavid court, and Persian was a shared medium across a vast region. Viewing Iran from its frontiers and through non-Persian sources does not dilute our field; it strengthens it. On the Council, I would support panels, online events and collaborative projects that bring different regional and methodological traditions into conversation, and that open the Association further to scholars working outside the established centers.
My experience in managing international academic exchange has taught me how much careful, sustained effort such connections require. If elected, I will devote the necessary time to the work of the Council and serve the Association with openness and collegiality. Thank you for considering my candidacy.

It would be an honor for me to serve as an AIS Council member. I believe my experience teaching at universities in Iran, Europe, and North America and my educational background in linguistics in Canada and applied linguistics and translation in Iran enable me to address interinstitutional and interdisciplinary issues raised and help them resolve with the rest of the AIS members and the board. In addition, having edited seven volumes on Persian language, linguistics, literature, and translation has given me the pleasure of working with many scholars in these fields. I hope I can bring to the table my forty years of experience teaching at the university and publishing with various publishing houses, so that I can help younger colleagues reach their potentials. I also believe that I might bring my service experience to the AIS council, having served in different capacities in various associations relevant to the Iranian studies, including serving as president in the American Association of Teachers of Persian (AATP), program committee member at MESA, as well as search committee for the AIS board members.

I am a 4th-year Ph.D. student of Ancient History at the University of California, Santa Barbara, focusing on the Achaemenid Empire. My dissertation is a study of Islamic-era knowledge of the Achaemenid kings from the 7th century CE to the Qajar period, connecting the history of ancient and Islamic Iran. I was born and raised in Iran and have travelled across the Persianate world to see the cultural, religious, artistic, and linguistic remnants of the Iranian world in different countries and now, with the travel ban, in museums in the United States.

I received my BA and MA in History from the University of Tehran, with a focus on Ancient Iran. At the University of Tehran, I served in several history associations, institutes, and journals dedicated to Iran’s history (please see my CV for details). At the University of California, Santa Barbara, I have been a member of the Iranian Studies Initiative for the past three years, managing the website, helping to organize talks with the Farhang Foundation, and co-coordinating an annual student symposium for Iranian Studies students. As an AIS student representative, my goals would be:

1. Creating networking opportunities for students through an email “opportunity newsletter” for conferences, fellowships, and awards in Iranian Studies
As a student, I am always looking for opportunities to network, present my work, secure funding, and find mentorship. At the same time, as a conference and funding coordinator, I have seen how difficult it can be to reach prospective applicants. At UCSB, with the help of Dr. Janet Afary, we created a mailing list of scholars and students working on Iran and the Persianate world to distribute information about our symposia, conferences, and funding opportunities. I would like to develop this idea on a larger scale through AIS. The AIS newsletter is an excellent resource, but because it is published only twice a year, it cannot accommodate opportunities with shorter deadlines. I would like to suggest an email “opportunity newsletter” through which universities, organizers, and institutions could submit announcements to AIS at no cost. Anyone who signs up could receive announcements about conferences, student symposia, awards, fellowships, and publication opportunities in Iranian Studies and related fields by email as soon as they are submitted. I would be happy to manage this list.

2. Bridging the gap between scholarship inside and outside Iran
I have noticed a significant gap between scholarship inside and outside Iran. In the current political atmosphere, Iranian academics are marginalized in many fields, but they should not be marginalized from the Association for Iranian Studies. I will advocate for online sessions and virtual paper presentations, as well as waiving fees for presenters from Iran or those with financial need.
I would also seek to connect Iranian Studies institutions inside and outside Iran through social media. While preparing for my candidacy, I read every page of the AIS website and reviewed its social media accounts. Some pages on the website have not been updated for years, while the social media accounts have relatively few posts. Updating the website and maintaining an active social media presence would therefore be among my priorities. My previous experience as a PR manager, social media manager, and website manager in both the US and Iran would allow me to help increase AIS’s visibility through a stronger online presence (please see my CV for details).

Biography
Eszter Melitta Szabo is a third-year PhD student in the Department of Near & Middle Eastern Civilizations at the University of Toronto, where she also obtained an MA. Her doctoral research focuses on Iranian women’s committed poetry published in periodicals between 1940 and the 1979 Iranian Revolution. She holds a BA in Indian Studies with a minor in Iranian Studies from Hungary, where she received extensive language and philological training in the languages and literatures of India and Iran. Her current research interests include comparative and world literature, translation studies, and periodical studies. She has also been involved in the Women Poets Iranica project as a research assistant. 

Agenda
In reviewing proposals from previous AIS student council members, I found many that I consider valuable and worth building upon (e.g., surveys and feedback-loops; virtual community; mentorship opportunities; resource-sharing mechanisms; improved, more informative newsletters), and which also resonate with concerns that I have heard from graduate students in my own circles. Following in the footsteps of previous council members and in appreciation of their work, my first priority would be to establish continuity: to learn which initiatives have been realized, which are ongoing, and what obstacles have prevented others from being realized. Instead of introducing an entirely new set of projects, my agenda is a more modest one, focused on developing a more systematic way of collecting and following up on previously and repeatedly raised concerns. A second, more specific initiative I would like to pursue is a series of virtual workshops aimed at helping students heed the often-given advice to “interdisciplinarize” their work. Students of Iranian Studies, particularly those of us in area studies departments, are frequently encouraged to position their research within broader disciplinary conversations, whether in comparative literature, history, cinema studies, or other fields. I hope to create a space for students to hear from more established scholars about how one might engage with broader questions and “theorize from” Iran. Finally, I would be happy to organize an informal social during the next AIS meeting and see you all there!