Sharmin and Bijan Mossavar-Rahmani Center for Iran and Persian Gulf StudiesAnnual Review 2022-23

Center for Iran and Persian Gulf Studies Annual Review 2022–23

Sharmin and Bijan Mossavar-Rahmani

Sharmin and Bijan

Mossavar-Rahmani

Center for Iran and Persian Gulf Studies

Annual Review

2022–23

Table of Contents

Letter from the Director

Center Events

Center Initiatives

Center Funding Awards

Research Reports

Postdoctoral Research Associates

Associate Research Scholars

Visiting Scholar

Looking Ahead

Incoming Fellows

People Administration

Center Research Associates

Visiting Scholar Executive Committee

Affiliated Faculty Advisory Council Members

Letter from the Director

We had a very busy, and at times, challenging year at the Center as the massive Women, Life, Freedom protests unfolded in Iran. I was on sabbatical during the fall semester, and we were fortunate that Professor Daniel Sheffield stepped in as the interim director to manage the Center’s activities with remarkable poise and thoughtfulness. The ongoing protests and the Iranian government’s brutal crackdown led to hundreds of deaths and thousands of arrests. Our Iran Center community followed these events closely with great interest and concern. In symbolic solidarity with Iranian women, we organized an all-women Wednesday Seminar Series in the spring semester that allowed for sustained dialogue about the protest movement. We invited women scholars to present their works in our seminar series in recognition of the significance of their contribution to the field of Iranian studies. You will find the video recordings of these remarkable presentations in different fields of history, literature, environment, ethnic and gender studies, and many others on our website. I am also grateful to our postdoctoral fellows who took part in responding to the events in Iran, such as their participation in a fall panel conversation on the protests, with a critical mind and with nuanced analyses.

As always, we owe much gratitude to the center staff, our Manager Femke de Ruyter and our Events Coordinator Becky Parnian for their tireless efforts to make our operations smooth and seamless. Unfortunately, after years of dedicated and creative work, Ms. Parnian left the Center to pursue another career. We will miss her.

One of the major achievements of the past year was the successful completion of our negotiations with the Association for the Study of Persianate Societies (ASPS) to move their home to Princeton University. The Center will also host the Association’s flagship publication Journal of Persianate Studies. We are very excited about this move and believe that the ASPS will continue to shape the conversation on the significance of both pre-modern and modern Persianate world.

We continue to shepherd the intellectual wealth of Princeton’s Persian archive in partnership with the library. Last year, Gilda Mojtahedi joined us as the Center’s Persian Materials Digitization Manager to help us in creating a webpage for all the Persian primary sources (periodicals, journals, newspapers, pamphlets, posters, etc.) available at Princeton University’s Firestone Library. She began to lay the foundation of this project but was quickly promoted to another position. I would like to thank Gilda for her hard work on this project. We are pleased to report that a successful search brought us Noushin Nowroozilarki as the new Persian Materials Digitization Manager who joined us in August and will continue the digital Iran research project.

The Center continues to host a vibrant and cross-disciplinary group of scholars. We are eager to welcome two new fellows in the fall. Dr. Negar Razavi will be joining us as an Associate Research Scholar from Northwestern University, where she was a Public Humanities Postdoctoral Fellow at the Kaplan Institute. Dr. Razavi earned her Ph.D. in anthropology from the University

Behrooz Ghamari-Tabrizi

Daniel Sheffield

of Pennsylvania. Her work addresses the role of the D.C.-based policy experts and think tanks in shaping U.S. security policies toward Iran. Dr. Maral Sahebjame will be joining us as a Postdoctoral Research Associate from the University of Washington-Seattle, where she earned her Ph.D. in legal anthropology. Based on extensive fieldwork in Iran, Dr. Sahebjame wrote her dissertation on the social, cultural, legal and religious contexts of cohabitation outside of marriage among young Iranian men and women.

I am also happy to report that Milad Odabaei, one of our research fellows, accepted a tenuretrack position at the University of Arkansas as an Assistant Professor of Anthropology. Milad has been a dynamic member of our intellectual community for the past three years. He initiated many projects at the Center and brought various scholars from around the world to Princeton for important conversations about anthropology and Iranian studies. We will miss having Milad on campus, but certainly hope that he will remain a member of our extended community and continue to contribute to our future projects.

We also had the pleasure of hosting Professor Siavash Saffari during the spring semester. An associate professor of West Asian Studies at Seoul National University, Prof. Saffari works on the intersection of Islam and political thought in modern and contemporary contexts. He received a Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of Alberta in 2013, followed by a postdoctoral fellowship in the Department of Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies at Columbia University between 2014 and 2016. He has also held fellowships from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, the Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies Research Group at the University of Alberta, and the College of Humanities at Seoul National University. Prof. Saffari concluded his visiting fellowship with a presentation at our last Wednesday seminar of the spring on Ehsan Tabari, one of the leading Iranian Marxist intellectuals of the 20th century.

Our Wednesday series of conversations continues with scholars of varying disciplines, including the introduction of new scholarly books on Iran and Persian Gulf studies. The recordings of these from last academic year remain accessible via the Center’s website.

Thanks to the initiative of our manager, Femke de Ruyter, we now have a renovated and beautifully designed lounge at the Center. The new lounge will be a place where our fellows, students and guests can meet informally and chat over a nice cup of hot tea or coffee. The new space is designed to encourage these informal interactions in order to further develop a strong community of engaged scholars and students. Please do stop by.

We have a very exciting lineup for the fall, beginning with our Fall Reception. Please check the back cover and our website for details and updates. Stay safe, remain curious, and follow our programs.

Yours,

Behrooz Ghamari-Tabrizi Director, Sharmin and Bijan Mossavar-Rahmani Center for Iran and Persian Gulf Studies Chair, Department of Near Eastern Studies Professor of Near Eastern Studies

Center Events

Sharmin and Bijan MossavarRahmani Center Events

The Sharmin and Bijan Mossavar-Rahmani Center events fall under five series: The Mossavar-Rahmani Center Seminar Series, which address issues related to Iran and the Persian Gulf in the 19th–21st centuries and focus on the region’s role and significance in the contemporary world; the Book Launch Series, which introduces emerging scholars and artists through interdisciplinary discussions following the release of a new book; Conferences & Workshops which provide an in-depth focus on particular subjects or projects hosted by the Center;

*Co-sponsored Events are those in which the Center collaborates with other academic units; and finally our Film, Literature and the Arts Series, which explores cultural issues through artistic mediums.

*Organizing department is listed in parentheses

September 14, 2022

Kian Tajbakhsh, Fellow, Committee on Global Thought, Columbia University

“Creating Local Democracy in Iran: State Building and the Politics of Decentralization” Book Launch Series

September 21, 2022

Alex Boodrookas, Assistant Professor, Metropolitan State University of Denver

“Comrades Estranged: The Struggle for Citizenship in the Twentieth-Century

Persian Gulf”: The Indo-Persian Literary and Cultural Landscape

Mossavar-Rahmani Seminar Series

September 22–24, 2022

Festival including a student-focused poetry reading workshop, a multidisciplinary conference and a musical concert.

“The Garden of Bedil”

Co-Sponsored Events (Princeton Institute for

International and Regional Studies, Program in South Asian Studies)

September 28, 2022

Beeta Baghoolizadeh, Associate Research Scholar, Sharmin and Bijan Mossavar-Rahmani Center, Princeton University

“The Color Black: Enslavement and Erasure in Iran”

Mossavar-Rahmani Seminar Series

October 5, 2022

Mazyar Lotfalian, Independent Scholar

“What Do People Do with Images? Aesthetics, Politics, and the Production of Iranian Visual Culture in Transnational Circuits”

Mossavar-Rahmani Seminar Series

October 6, 2022

Beeta Baghoolizadeh, Naveed Mansoori, Milad Odabaei and Marzieh Tofighi Darian, Research Scholars, Sharmin and Bijan MossavarRahmani Center, Princeton University

“A Conversation about Protests in Iran”

Mossavar-Rahmani Seminar Series

October 12, 2022

Pamela Karimi, Professor, University of Massachusetts-Dartmouth

“Alternative Iran: Contemporary Art and Critical Spatial Practice”

Mossavar-Rahmani Seminar Series

October 14, 2022

Reza Aslan, Writer, Producer, Professor, T.V. Host, University of California-Riverside

“An American Martyr in Persia: The Epic Life and Tragic Death of Howard Baskerville” Book Launch Series

October 26, 2022

Abdie Kazemipur, Professor, Chair of Ethnic Studies, University of Calgary

“Scared as Secular: Religious Developments in Post-Revolutionary Iran and Global Debates on Secularity”

Mossavar-Rahmani Seminar Series

November 16, 2022

Ghoncheh Tazmini, Associate Member, Centre for Iranian Studies, SOAS, University of London

“The Impact of the 2022 FIFA World Cup on Iran: A Clean Sheet for Scoring Political Points”

Mossavar-Rahmani Seminar Series

November 30, 2022

Golnar Nikpour, Assistant Professor, Dartmouth College

“The Incarcerated Modern: Prisons and Public Life in Iran”

Mossavar-Rahmani Seminar Series

December 7, 2022

Sheragim Jenabzadeh, Postdoctoral Research

Associate, Sharmin and Bijan MossavarRahmani Center, Princeton University

“Iranian Students in Interwar Berlin: Instrumentality, Self-Agency and the Politics of Youth”

Mossavar-Rahmani Seminar Series

December 14, 2022

Aria Fani, Assistant Professor, University of Washington

“The Formation of Adabiyat as a Modern Literary Discourse”

Mossavar-Rahmani Seminar Series

February 1, 2023

Arzoo Osanloo, Professor, University of Washington

“Women, Politics and Social Transformation in Iran”

Mossavar-Rahmani Seminar Series

Above Center fellows participate in a panel conversation on the Iranian "Women, Life, and Freedom" protests. Left to right: Naveed Mansoori, Beeta Baghoolizadeh, Milad Odabaei, Marzieh TofighiDarian

February 8, 2023

Leila Pourtavaf, Assistant Professor, York University

“Gulistan in Black and White: The Gendered and Racial Legacies of Slavery in 19th Century Qajar Iran”

Mossavar-Rahmani Seminar Series

February 15, 2023

Bahar Davary, Professor, University of San Diego

“Breaking the Mirror: Humanism in the works of Sohrab Sepehri and James Baldwin”

Mossavar-Rahmani Seminar Series

February 22, 2023

Manijeh Moradian, Assistant Professor, Barnard College, Columbia University

“This Flame Within: Iranian Revolutionaries in the United States”

Book Launch Series

March 1, 2023

Negar-Sadat Razavi, Postdoctoral Fellow, Northwestern University

“The Geopolitics of Illegibility: Iran Expertise and the Shaping of U.S.-Iran Policy”

Mossavar-Rahmani Seminar Series

March 1, 2023

Anahita Ghazvinizadeh, Iranian Filmmaker and Assistant Professor, University of Iowa

“Interiority on Screen”

Film, Literature, and the Arts

March 8, 2023

Donna Honarpisheh, Knight Art+ Research Center Curator, Institute of Contemporary Art Miami

“Dislocated Modernism: The Interstices of Mythology and Destruction in the Works of Bahman Mohasses”

Mossavar-Rahmani Seminar Series

March 22, 2023

Leila Rahimi Bahmany, Visitor, Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, New Jersey

Donna Honarpisheh

“Writing Against the Center: Azeri Turkish Narratives of Iran”

Mossavar-Rahmani Seminar Series

March 22, 2023

Chowra Makaremi, Filmmaker and anthropologist, National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS), Institute for Interdisciplinary Research on Social Issues, école des Hautes études en Sciences Sociales. Shahla Talebi, Associate Professor, Arizona State University

“Hitch: An Iranian Story” Film, Literature, and the Arts

March 29, 2023

Asma Mehan, Assistant Professor, Texas Tech University, Huckabee College of Architecture

“Tehran: From Sacred to Radical”

Mossavar-Rahmani Seminar Series

April 5, 2023

Ahoo Najafian, Assistant Professor, Macalester College

“Spectacle of Secrets: Hafez in Pre-Revolutionary Iran”

Mossavar-Rahmani Seminar Series

April 12, 2023

Assal Rad, Senior Research Fellow, National Iranian American Council

“State of Resistance: Politics, Culture, and Identity in Modern Iran”

Mossavar-Rahmani Seminar Series

April 13, 2023

Saïd Amir Arjomand, Professor Emeritus, SUNY Stony Brook

“Messianism and Sociopolitical Revolution in Medieval Islam”

Mossavar-Rahmani Seminar Series

April 19, 2023

Seema Golestaneh, Assistant Professor, Cornell University

“Unknowing and the Everyday: Sufism and Knowledge in Iran"

Mossavar-Rahmani Seminar Series

April 26, 2023

Marie Ranjbar, Assistant Professor, University of Colorado-Boulder

“Iran as Subaltern Empire: Lake Urmia, Environmental Racism, and Coloniality in Iranian Azerbaijan”

Mossavar-Rahmani Seminar Series

May 3, 2023

Siavash Saffari, Associate Professor, Seoul National University

“Marxism, Islam, and a Global History of Modernity”

Center Initiatives

And Now, Imagine!

In Summer 2023, Lindsey Stephenson (Postdoctoral Research Associate, Sharmin and Bijan Mossavar-Rahmani Center), and Samin Rashidbeigi (Ph.D. student, Near Eastern Studies) carried out their project, “And now… Imagine!,” a retreat fostering creative expression among refugee communities that was supported by a Humanities Council Grant. Working with The Lewis Center for the Arts, Princeton’s Counseling and Psychological Services, the Prison Teaching Initiative and the McGraw Center for Teaching and Learning, Princeton University activists and academics partnered with the Waldorf School of Princeton to design a one-day creative retreat for Afghan refugee teenagers that encouraged them to imagine a future of possibility through making art.

By early September 2021, more than 60,000 Afghans were evacuated from their homes and brought to the United States. And while many individuals were responsible for engaging with policy-oriented matters like citizenship, identity and politics of integration, an unaddressed, but urgent issue was refugees’ mental health.

The intent of “And Now, Imagine!” was to focus on refugees’ mental health by building a curriculum for creative expression among refugee communities. Transcending the spoken word, art allows for communication among newly resettled refugees. Imaginative projects enable refugees to communicate feelings, needs and aspirations without shame or fear of judgement. In creative spaces, they exercise reclaiming control over what they wish to offer the world. Moreover, art can bring people together and build new cross-cultural communities that are based on aesthetic interests.

Through both extensive research and collaboration with Princeton’s intellectual resources, Samin and Lindsey developed an inclusive,

A participant's creation in the “And Now, Imagine!” retreat.

accessible and trauma-informed practical curriculum for a one-day creative retreat. They worked with the Waldorf School of Princeton to assess and troubleshoot the curriculum by offering it to a select group of teenagers. “And Now, Imagine!” provided an occasion to participate in a creative space with no pressure and complete acceptance,” said Stephenson. “For the children involved, this was a unique opportunity to reflect on the beauty of home and engage with their feelings of homesickness and loss.”

Incapacitations: Tradition, Destruction, and Forms of Life

Center researcher Milad Odabaei, Basit K. Iqbal from McMaster University, and Aaron Eldridge from University of Toronto, convened the “Incapacitations: Tradition, Destruction, and Forms of Life,” workshop last May. The workshop was generously supported by a Social Science Research Council 2022 Religion and the Public Sphere Summer Institute Funding for Collaborative Projects grant and the Princeton Humanities Council and was hosted by the Mossavar-Rahmani Center.

Bringing together 16 scholars of religion, anthropology, politics, and history to present and discuss works in progress, workshop sessions included informal group discussions and shared meals over the course of three days. Participants drew on ethnographic fieldwork, historical research, and philosophical inquiries to reflect on the possibilities of critical analysis and creative response to contemporary experiences of violence, loss, and destruction. They theorized, in their papers and in collective discussions, different forms of “incapacitation”—social, political, epistemological, and more—across multiple fields. Select papers presented at the workshop may be further developed for a special issue of the journal History of the Present

The meeting in Princeton was the culmination of a year-long, virtual reading group in which workshop presenters (and a few others who were unable to join in person) met on a monthly basis. Together they read and discussed selected works by Hannah Arendt, Cora Diamond, Sigmund Freud, Michel Foucault, Jonathan Lear, Adam Stern, Jalal

Workshop participants listen attentively

Center Initiatives

a group dinner followed. Wajd combines footage from before and after the war in Syria, following displaced Sufi musicians to Turkey and the Netherlands. It was chosen as it evocatively explores the themes that the workshop pursued conceptually. The formal workshop sessions began the following day at Palmer House, across from Princeton University’s campus, and included four sessions of two presenters each interspersed with lunch and dinner. The workshop concluded on Sunday with the presentation of two more papers and a final group discussion led by Joan Wallach Scott (IAS).

Workshop presenters/papers included:

• Jonathan Boyarin (Cornell)

“The Pain of Promises Unkept”

• Sara Pursley (NYU)

“From Jihad to the Time of Fitna: Pastoral Governance, Reasons of State, and the Failed Defense of Ottoman Iraq”

• Niki Clements (Rice)

“Beyond Capacity: Foucault and the Cynic”

Toufic, Sinan Antoon, Michel de Certeau, Asbiro Jabbour, Javad Tabatabai, and Fadi Bardawil. In doing so, the participants developed a set of shared reference points for thinking about the possible “incapacitation” of traditions as part of the experience of contemporary forms of violence and destruction.

During the workshop, scholars and fellows in residence at Princeton University and from the Institute for Advanced Study (IAS) joined members of the reading group. They responded to individual papers and offered feedback on the inquiries developed over the course of the reading group that led to the workshop.

The workshop kicked off with welcoming remarks by MRC Director Behrooz GhamariTabrizi and opening statements from the organizers Milad Odabaei, Basit Kareem Iqbal and Aaron Eldridge. A screening of the documentary Wajd: Songs of Separation and

• Aaron Eldridge (Toronto)

“On Form of Life and Its Secular Release”

• Samera Esmeir (UC Berkeley/ IAS)

“Revolutionary Mutations”

• Basit Kareem Iqbal (McMaster),

“The Threshold of Capacity: Tribulation and Ambivalence in Zaatari Camp”

• Rajbir Singh Judge (CSU Long Beach)

“A Critique of Contextual Reason: A Parallax View in Punjab”

• Katherine Lemons (McGill)

“Layered Incapacitations and the Intensification of Law”

• Milad Odabaei (Princeton)

“Women, Life, Incapacitation”

• James Adam Redfield (Chicago)

“Kant’s Racist Anthropology in Context: Ethnographic Archives of the German Enlightenment”

Center Funding Awards

The Sharmin and Bijan Mossavar-Rahmani Center for Iran and Persian Gulf Studies provides summer grants to undergraduate and graduate students pursuing research and intensive language training primarily related to the scholarship of Iran and the Persian Gulf.

The following students received grants:

Graduate Funding

Hasan Hameed

History

Eric Medawar

History

Jamie O’Connell

Near Eastern Studies

Athina Pfeiffer

Near Eastern Studies

Mir Salar Razavi

Near Eastern Studies

Fatih Tarhan

Near Eastern Studies

Undergraduate Funding

Pia Haykel (2025)

Laura Robertson (2024)

Research Reports

Postdoctoral Research Associates

Sheida Dayani

My main project during the 2022–2023 academic year was revising my book manuscript, Making History with Theatre in Modern Iran: Juggling Revolutionaries, contracted by Edinburgh University Press. By examining the evolution of modern and revolutionary theatre in connection with the preexisting performance traditions in the 19th and early 20th centuries, this monograph offers a new social history of Iran based on theatrical sources. The fellowship at the Mossavar-Rahmani Center allowed me to incorporate into the manuscript the fieldwork that I had previously conducted in Iran, and broadened the scope of my research by giving me access to the valuable Persian archives at the Princeton University Library.

I was invited to contribute a book chapter to Political and Social History of Modern Iran: Essays in Honor of Ervand Abrahamian (Edinburgh UP, forthcoming 2024). My chapter, “Dialogue in Qānun: Theatrical Reporting as a Political Device,” is part of my larger research that revisits political texts in their immediate theatrical, literary, and social disciplines. I showed how the Qānun newspaper (1890–1893) has been misread by scholars due to our lack of recognizing its theatrical context, and argued that much of its success at the time of its circulation was due to an awareness of the paper’s theatricality by its contemporary readers.

I also accepted an offer to contribute a chapter to the Cambridge History of Modern Iranian Political Thought (Cambridge UP, forthcoming 2026). “The Emergence of Political Thought in Modern Iranian Playwriting and Theatre” will examine the plays of the late

Qajar and Constitutional period for their political ideas to understand the social application of those ideas. The chapter argues that in navigating the historical development of political thought, it is crucial to compare how certain political ideas were presented to the public, as in theatre, and how the same ideas were discussed among the ideologues and played on the ground.

At the Association for Iranian Studies conference at Universidad de Salamanca, Spain, I organized a panel titled, Urbanites and Urban Airs: Modern Cities and the Production of Culture in Iran, where I presented my paper, “Uninvited Horses: The Development of Indigenous Iranian Theatre in Relation to the Cities.” While in Spain, I also took a research trip to Almagro for its theatre remains from the 17th century, the oldest playhouse in Spain, and the National Museum of Theatre. My goal was to compare the early modern religious theatre of Spain to its Iranian counterpart due to the similarities between the current forms of the two genres.

The guests that I invited to the MossavarRahmani lecture series were Professor Aria Fani (University of Washington) in Fall 2022 and Professor Anahita Ghazvinizadeh (The University of Iowa) in Spring 2023. At Prof. Fani’s lecture, titled “Formation of Adabiyat as a Modern Literary Discourse,” I served as moderator and discussant. Anahita Ghazvinizadeh, renowned filmmaker and Head of Screenwriting at University of Iowa, gave her lecture, “Interiority on Screen,” which I moderated in tandem with two campus screenings of her films, “They” and “When the Kid was a Kid.”

My contributions to the Department of Near Eastern Studies at Princeton include giving a guest lecture on Sadeq Hedayat at the Near Eastern Humanities course taught by Professor Lara Harb, and giving a reading of my Persian poetry with English translations followed by a Q&A at the “NES Spring Café” organized by Dr. Mounia Mnouer. I was also invited by Heartbeat

Opera in New York to speak as a theatre critic about a performance of TOSCA in April 2023.

Sheragim Jenabzadeh

I feel very fortunate to have arrived at the Sharmin and Bijan Mossavar-Rahmani Center in Fall 2022, with many of the pandemic’s restrictions lifted, and the Center’s events proceeding in full bloom. From the first week and thereafter, I became acquainted with established and emerging scholars conducting exciting research in diverse fields related to Iran and the Persian Gulf. The opportunity to engage with their work in person has been invaluable in how I approach my own research and scholarship. I have also benefited greatly from lectures and events held across campus, especially those in the Department of History and the Department of Near Eastern Studies. Finally, the Center’s and University’s helpful and attentive staff, and wealth of scholarly resources have made navigating my research a joy.

Shortly after arriving, I was given the opportunity to present a part of my research during the Center’s weekly lecture series. Titled “Visions of Youth for a Future Iran: Iranian Students in Interwar Berlin,” my talk examined the important role played by Iranian diasporic networks in Berlin on Iranian student political activity and intellectual development, both for nationalist/pro-authoritarian students and for leftist students, many of whom would become architects of the Pahlavi state or its opponents. Furthermore, I showed that Iranian student political activity was not isolated from global anti-imperial and leftist movements, and that their activities and publications contributed to the rising revolutionary tensions in the Weimar Republic and provoked a direct backlash by the German state to ban Iranian publications and deport active students. Much of the inspirations for Iranian leftist activity in the proceeding decades had

their roots in Berlin’s leftist and diasporic networks during the 1920s and early 1930s.

During the past year I have also been able to work on revising my dissertation into a book manuscript, which incorporates the research presented above to examine the global turn of interwar Berlin through the formation of transnational revolutionary networks by Iranian and other Asian and African migrants. This project also aims to shift attention away from predominant narratives of Weimar cosmopolitanism because of transatlantic exchanges by shedding light on non-European and non-Western diasporic intellectual productions and their engagement and exchanges with German nationalist, anti-imperial, and leftist movements.

This fellowship has also allowed me to revise an existing article for publication and begin work on crafting a new one, both of which examine different aspects of the global circulations of interwar culture and political ideologies: the simultaneous reflections on the ‘New Woman’ by both German and Iranian intellectuals; the conceptual link between youth and modernity; and the global turn of Nazism with the start of WWII and its impact on the 1941 invasion of Iran.

I am excited to continue my research as a Mossavar-Rahmani Fellow in the coming fall and to contribute to the intellectually stimulating events regularly held by the Center.

Naveed Mansoori

This year, I produced three major publications. First, I published “Students of Revolution: An Essay on Ali Shariati’s Pedagogy” in Philosophy and Global Affairs. That article looked at Shariati in his capacity as a student in contrast to the convention to view him as a teacher or “ideologue.” It showed how Shariati became immersed in media environments as if they were “public

schools” where he and his compatriots underwent a collaborative process of collective subject formation. Second, I published “The Dialectical Utopianism of Ali Shariati” in Globalizing Political Theory. The book brought together scholars invested in, or practicing nonetheless, a method that de-provincializes political theory. My chapter reconstructed Shariati’s well-known lecture, “Return to Self,” to show that he saw the wealth of “global” history in local history and geography. Pitched to undergraduates, the chapter was also a primer on dialectical thinking.

Finally, my article, “A Mirror for the Crowds: The Mediated Terrain of Political Leadership in Post-revolutionary Iran,” was accepted for publication in Contemporary Political Theory The article examines crowds, leaders and media after the 1979 Revolution. It focuses on media that contests hegemonic power by acting as a “guide” for an otherwise “leaderless movement.” It argues that such media reveals the partisan reality of political order obscured by the myth of leadership, the idea that the presence of a leader implies a political order. I focus on International Women’s Day 1979 when crowds protesting Ayatollah Khomeini’s decision to enforce the veil were caught in a paradox: as subjects of history and objects of representation. With focus on the nonpartisan newspaper Ayandegan, the article shows how the crowds, objects of representation, became political subjects as potential guides. Despite its efforts to remain nonpartisan, Ayandegan became partisan when it unwittingly challenged the ‘charismatic leader’ by giving presence to the partisan crowds. The mediated relation between leader and led on March 8, 1979 and after is instructive for our understanding of the role media can play in leaderless movements.

I will attend the annual conference of the Western Political Science Association in early April to participate in a roundtable with the editors and some contributors of Globalizing Political Theory. In August, I will attend the annual conference of the American Political

Research Reports

Science Association where I will present my forthcoming article in Contemporary Political Theory

I also focused on my book. While the first generation of critical theory asked how cultural institutions produce order because of a concern for fascism (in Germany) and the administrative state (in bourgeois society more broadly), my book looks to Iran where MarxistLeninists saw an inverted problem: cultural institutions were producing disorder. Where critical theorists have focused attention on the tyranny of political vision, I focus on how the early diagnosis that cultural institutions circulated an anarchy of political vision endured in intellectual and cultural history across ideological divisions. So doing, I chart a more relevant tradition of critical theory for a “posttruth” age where there is a so-called “anarchy of epistemic authority.” The article I published in Contemporary Political Theory is part of the third chapter of this book project: while the history of the Islamic Revolution is often narrated as a “charismatic revolution” spearheaded by a “charismatic leader,” I suggest that we can see an anarchy of charismatic authority if we disabuse ourselves of the notion that charismatic actors are solely individuals. The crowd, as charismatic actor, contended with the “charismatic authority” of the “Imam.”

Lindsey Stephenson

This year I have been primarily writing and editing my manuscript. In the fall of 2022, I participated in a manuscript workshop and review. In the spring I completed a research trip to London where I conducted research in the British Library and the British National Archives. I am currently in the process of finishing my book proposal for my manuscript titled Mobility Liabilities: Iranian Migrants and the Making of the Modern Persian Gulf

I prepared a talk “Cooking, Carrying, and

Crafting: How Iranian Migrants Reshaped Everyday Life in Kuwait and Bahrain, 1900-1950” for the 2022 Association for Iranian Studies Conference, but was unable to attend due to threats on my panel.

I published a review of Between Dreams and Ghosts by Andrea Wright for the Journal of South Asian Studies and I am currently reviewing Iran in Motion: Mobility, Space, and the Trans-Iranian Railway by Mikiya Koyagi for the International Journal of Middle East Studies.

In 2023, I have continued to volunteer with Afghan refugees in the Princeton area. This year I received a grant from the Princeton Humanities Council for “And Now, Imagine!,” a project which I co-lead with Samin Rashidbeigi that brings Afghan youth together for artistic expression and creative imagining. The workshops, hosted by the Waldorf School of Princeton, are being held over the summer of 2023.

Marzieh Tofighi Darian

Joining the MossavarRahmani Center has provided me with a unique opportunity to delve into the field of Iranian studies. Through this experience, I have had the privilege of engaging with cutting-edge research presented by accomplished scholars in the field, each with their own distinctive disciplinary lens and methodological diversity. This exposure has significantly expanded my knowledge and assisted me in developing theoretical frameworks on various aspects of Iran’s historical and contemporary challenges while also considering its future trajectory. As a lawyer specializing in comparative constitutional law, I have found great enrichment and stimulation in the disciplinary diversity of my colleagues, as well as our weekly guest speakers, spanning from history to anthropology and political theory, prompting me to approach my research in a manner that is accessible to other disciplines.

This past year, I have worked on research projects and two articles that examine the role of constitutional courts/councils in Iran and the broader Middle East. By drawing upon existing literature on the function of high courts within authoritarian contexts, I seek to understand the jurisprudence of the Guardian Council and its impact on the erosion of democracy in Iran. This project also aims to assess how Islamic review might be turned into a mode of “abusive judicial review.” Simultaneously, I have continued my research on the role of the Middle Eastern constitutional courts in mediating intra-religious divisions through their adjudicatory methodology and through positioning their institutional power vis-à-vis other political branches. These projects were presented at Princeton University and the International Society of Public Law (ICON•S) conference in New Zealand. My studies have also sparked new research questions on other institutional challenges confronting the state of constitutionalism in Iran. Additionally, I have been collaborating with the Max Plank Encyclopedia on Comparative Constitutional Law on matters concerning Iran’s constitution.

I have also actively engaged in a close collaboration with a distinguished group of scholars in a “Shia-Jewish Legal Reasoning” initiative. Our work involves studying, teaching, and reflecting on our respective jurisprudences through unique perspectives offered by each other’s traditions. Alongside our regular study sessions, we have conducted two colloquia, both virtually and in person, hosted at Indiana University. These colloquia have afforded me the opportunity to present and engage in discussions on topics such as theocracy and constitutionalism within Shi’i and Jewish jurisprudence.

Over the past year, the “Woman, Life, Freedom” movement has inspired me to think and reflect on the constitutional predicaments of the ongoing situation in Iran. These reflections have led me to both write on the subject (constitutional blog posts) and participate in various panel discussions, including at

Princeton University and other venues. Witnessing the deteriorating conditions in our neighboring country, I have been privileged to join a grassroots nonprofit organization dedicated to providing online education for Afghan women. In this capacity, I took part in designing and co-teaching a constitutional law course specifically tailored for Afghan female law students from different universities whose educations were abruptly disrupted. This experience, although bittersweet, allowed me to witness firsthand the immense struggles faced by Afghan women as they fight for their fundamental rights as well as their incredible resilience, determination, and unwavering commitment to study, even in the absence of immediate opportunities within their chosen professions.

Associate Research Scholars

Beeta

Baghoolizadeh

As my first year as an Associate Research Fellow at the MossavarRahmani Center for Iran and Persian Gulf Studies comes to an end, I am grateful for the time, space, and collegial atmosphere that I have had to drive my work forward. During this year, I finalized revisions for my book, The Color Black: Enslavement and Erasure in Iran, which will be published by Duke University Press in March 2024, and my article, “Seeing Black America in Iran,” was accepted for publication in American Historical Review (AHR), the flagship journal in history. I also gave several talks throughout the year and began to work on my second book project, The Blurring of Myth, Memory, and Modernity.

My book, The Color Black, examines the history and afterlives of slavery in Iran during the 19th and 20th centuries. I use an interdisciplinary methodological approach to analyze textual, visual, and spatial sources and unearth an intentionally hidden history of enslavement and race. I place enslavement and erasure

in Iran at the center of global changes, including trans-Atlantic slavery and abolition, colonialism, nationalism, and technological advancements, to deepen our understanding of race-making in the 19th and 20th centuries and the implications it continues to carry today. The Color Black has been awarded the Duke University Press Scholars of Color First Book Award, and I received awards from Princeton’s Open Access Publication Fund Program and the Mossavar-Rahmani Center toward making The Color Black open access in the years to come.

On the first day of my appointment at the Center, I was in Salamanca, Spain attending the Association for Iranian Studies conference, where I spoke on my research on memory and myth-making around enslavement. Through the rest of the year, I gave several more talks, beginning with a talk at the Mossavar-Rahmani Center in September, where I was able to share my research with my new colleagues and the broader Princeton community. Given the tragic and ongoing protests in Iran, I joined a few of my Mossavar-Rahmani Center colleagues on a roundtable to provide history and context in October. I spoke at the Presidential Panel “What can the Middle East Teach Us About Race?” at the MESA conference in December. During the Spring semester, I gave two book talks at New York University and the University of Virginia, and I also presented a paper at the “Imaginary Divides: the Middle East and Africa across Empires, Oceans, and Borders conference,” held at George Washington University.

Beyond academic talks, I traveled to Geneva in November, where I was invited to speak at the United Nations at the Middle East meeting for the International Decade for the People of African Descent. The meeting, which spanned two days, brought together activists and academics from and of the region to discuss the importance of African-descended peoples and recognizing their histories. This meeting was organized by the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights.

Next year, I plan to build on this work and to move forward with the research and writing toward my second book, The Blurring of Myth, Memory, and Modernity.

Milad Odabaei

The 2022-2023 academic year was my last year as an Associate Research Scholar at the Center. I continued work on my book-length study of the politics of translation of social theory and Continental philosophy in post-revolutionary Iran. I also completed a number of other research and writing projects. These include “Sickness of the Revolution: Loss, Fetishism, and the Impossibility of Politics” (Critical Times 6:2), a critical reflection on the commemoration of violence and loss in the historiography of the 1979 Revolution. Conventional accounts of the Revolution emphasize the loss of the Revolution’s “true” spirit in the violence of the Islamic state and geopolitics. In contrast, “Sickness of the Revolution” explores the vicissitudes of violence and loss in the history of revolutionary Iran through an ethnographic engagement with the children of revolutionaries, the generation born in the violent aftermath of the event during the war with Iran (1980–88). While highlighting the limit of conventional accounts of violence and loss, I relate the Revolution to the loss of earlier political-theological paradigms and the violence born in the absence of a practicable political paradigm.

I co-authored, with Basit K. Iqbal, “For A Historical Grammar of Concepts: Thinking about Political Theology with Talal Asad.” This study of political theology in the work of the anthropologist Talal Asad will appear as a chapter in Political Theology Reimagined, Duke University Press.

In the wake of the “Woman, Life, Freedom” movement, I participated in a panel conversation on the uprisings that was organized

by the Center and delivered guest lectures in two distinct anthropology courses on campus. During the Spring semester, I was invited by the editors of the journal Cultural Anthropology to curate a forum on the movement. The collection, composed of eight contributions and my introduction, is available online: https://culanth.org/fieldsights/ series/woman-life-freedom. It aims to move beyond news headlines and highlight the feminist and revolutionary character of the movement in relation to the politics of the preceding decades. I suggest that the “Woman, Life, Freedom” movement represents an acute disenchantment with the politicization of women’s public appearance as a measure of “westoxification” (ghabzadegi) or cultural autonomy of Iran as a modern nation. The movement therefore demands a reformulation of the relationship between the teachings of the Shari’a and the constitutional paradigm of modern society on the one hand, and the relation between Iran and the West as distinct, but interrelated geopolitical and cultural spheres on the other.

In addition to my research and writing, I taught an undergraduate course in the anthropology of religion on the topic of fetishism in the Spring semester. In May, I convened Incapacitations: Tradition, Destruction, and Forms of Life. This three-day workshop, funded by the Social Science Research Council and hosted by the Center, built on a year-long virtual reading group. It brought together 17 scholars of ethics and politics for a consideration of “incapacitation” as an existential and epistemological condition that is co-extensive with ongoing forms of violence and destruction. A special issue of History of the Present based on the workshop proceedings will be forthcoming in 2025.

As I leave Princeton in the fall and begin a new position as an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of Arkansas, I will surely miss my colleagues and our conversations at the Center. However, I look forward to building on the relationships I have been

able to foster over the course of my fellowship at Princeton University in the years to come.

Visiting Scholar

Siavash Saffari

Ms. Femke de Ruyter, for whose kindness and generosity I will always be grateful, has asked me to submit a short report relating to my brief time at the Mossavar-Rahmani Center. Her request came on the same day I arrived at Seongu-ri, a small island village off South Korea’s southeast coast, where my wife and I are spending part of the summer. I find the gentle rhythm of this sleepy fishing village to be the ideal backdrop for the occasionally taxing work of reading and writing about modern Iranian intellectual history. Seongu-ri feels worlds away from Princeton with its lively university campus and bustling downtown. And yet, in Princeton’s peaceful and picturesque charm, and in the company of brilliant scholars at the MRC, I found all the inspiration that I needed to conduct my research and conjure up new projects.

I was privileged to receive a Visiting Fellowship at the MRC during my Spring 2023 sabbatical leave from Seoul National University. In the course of this four-month fellowship, I worked on my forthcoming (co-edited with Arash Davari and Maryam Rabiee) volume, Spirit and Defiance: Ali Shariati in Translation. The book, which has received a subvention grant from the MRC, and which features works from several scholars with past and present affiliations to the Center, is scheduled to be published in 2024 by the University of Minnesota Press. My time at the Center was also spent on a research project related to the origins and evolutions of Islamic liberation theology, and the contributions therein of Iranian Muslim intellectuals. The result is a journal article, titled “Tawhid Paradigm and an Inclusive Concept of Liberative Struggle,” which has been accepted for

publication at Religions. Finally, at Princeton, I began to work on a new monograph project. Provisionally titled The Left and the Question of Religion in Twentieth Century Iran, my research asks how successive generations of leftist Iranian intellectuals throughout the previous century sought to conceptualize the relationship between socialist commitment and public and private expressions of Islamic religiosity. I had the opportunity to present my initial research results as part of the MRC’s Spring 2023 lecture series. Titled “Marxism, Islam, and a Global History of Modernity: Ehsan Tabari (1917–1989) Reconsidered,” my presentation was an attempt toward reconsidering Tabari’s sustained and extensive engagements with Islamic philosophy and mysticism, and situating his work in conversation with other Marxist interventions on the non-European trajectories of dialectical materialism.

In carrying out all of this work, I benefited tremendously from the rich academic resources at Princeton University, as well as from insightful conversations with and constructive feedback from the researchers at the MRC. I am indebted to the Director, Professor Behrooz Ghamari-Tabrizi, for his gracious hospitality and his sound and considered advice as I tried to think through some of the questions that emerged in relation to my various research projects. I would also like to thank Beeta Baghoolizadeh, Sheida Dayani, Sheragim Jenabzadeh, Naveed Mansoori, Milad Odabaei, Lindsey Stephenson and Marzieh Tofighi Darian, for welcoming me into their warm and inclusive, but certainly stimulating academic space. The spirit of camaraderie and trust that exists at the Center is something that I truly cherished, and I would hope to carry that spirit with me as I return to my normal teaching and research duties at Seoul National University.

Looking Ahead

The Sharmin and Bijan Mossavar-Rahmani Center for Iran and Persian Gulf Studies promotes interdisciplinary approaches to advancing understanding of Iran and the Persian Gulf, with special attention to the region’s role and significance in the contemporary world. The goal of the program is to support outstanding scholars of Iran and the wider Persianate world at an early stage of their careers and thus to strengthen the field of Iranian and Persian Gulf Studies in the United States and abroad.

Incoming Fellows

Maral Sahebjame joins us from the University of Washington as a Postdoctoral Research Associate. Her project, “Between the Courtroom and the Seminary,” builds upon her dissertation research and sits at the intersection of gender, law, society, social movements and the state in Iran. The topic expands upon her research by addressing legal questions, and further engages in conversations such as “immorality vs. illegality” that others have not brought to the work. Her scope of research is broad as a result of the range of sources she draws upon, including more than 16 months of ethnographic fieldwork. Sahebjame engaged with men, women, lawyers, judges, academics, clerics and psychologists to show how through their everyday practices, Iranians control the legal debates and practices of gender and rights much more than most observers realize. Sahebjame’s project engages social movement theories within socio-legal studies, particularly Islamic law, and society studies. At the Center, she will benefit from Tofighi-Darian’s research as a social-legal scholar, and also from NES’ Satyel Larson as an ethnographer of gender studies. We look forward to Maral’s arrival on campus.

Negar-Sadat Razavi will join us from Northwestern University in the fall as an Associate Research Scholar. She will be working on a project titled: “The Security Paradox: Policy Expertise, Transnational Security, and the Politics of Knowing (and Unknowing) Iran from Washington. Intersecting political science and anthropology, Razavi’s research brings a critical, people-centered approach to studies of international security, gender, expertise, and empire to U.S.-Iran relations. Her proposed project draws on ethnographic fieldwork in Washington D.C. and Tehran where she evaluated the expanding influence of a transnational network of policy experts in shaping U.S. security policies toward Iran and the broader Middle East. She explores how and why non-state analysts have collectively promoted security approaches toward the Islamic Republic that not only exacerbate insecurities for local communities but seem to contradict the U.S.’ stated security objective. We look forward to welcoming her as our colleague.

People

Administration

Behrooz Ghamari-Tabrizi

Chair, Department of Near Eastern Studies; Director, Sharmin and Bijan Mossavar-Rahmani Center for Iran and Persian Gulf Studies; Professor of Near Eastern Studies

Femke de Ruyter

Center Manager, Sharmin and Bijan MossavarRahmani Center for Iran and Persian Gulf Studies

Gilda Modjtahedi

Special Collections Assistant, Library-Scholarly Collections and Research Services, Firestone Library

Becky Parnian

Event Coordinator, Sharmin and Bijan Mossavar-Rahmani Center for Iran and Persian Gulf Studies

Center Research Associates

Beeta Baghoolizadeh

Associate Research Scholar, Sharmin and Bijan Mossavar-Rahmani Center for Iran and Persian Gulf Studies

Left to Right: Lindsey Stephenson, Milad Odabaei, Marzieh TofighiDarian, Daniel Sheffield, Beeta Baghoolizadeh, Sheida Dayani, Naveed Mansoori, Femke de Ruyter

Sheida Dayani

Postdoctoral Research Associate, Sharmin and Bijan Mossavar-Rahmani Center for Iran and Persian Gulf Studies

Sheragim Jenabzadeh

Postdoctoral Research Associate, Sharmin and Bijan Mossavar-Rahmani Center for Iran and Persian Gulf Studies

Naveed Mansoori

Postdoctoral Research Associate, Sharmin and Bijan Mossavar-Rahmani Center for Iran and Persian Gulf Studies

Milad Odabaei

Associate Research Scholar, Sharmin and Bijan Mossavar-Rahmani Center for Iran and Persian Gulf Studies

Lindsey Stephenson

Postdoctoral Research Associate, Sharmin and Bijan Mossavar-Rahmani Center for Iran and Persian Gulf Studies

Marzieh Tofighi-Darian

Postdoctoral Research Associate, Sharmin and Bijan Mossavar-Rahmani Center for Iran and Persian Gulf Studies

Visiting Scholar

Siavash Saffari

Assistant Professor, Seoul National University

Executive Committee

Julia Elyachar

Associate Professor of Anthropology and the Princeton Institute for International and Regional Studies

Dimitri H. Gondicas (Sits with Committee)

Senior Professional Specialist, The Council of the Humanities; Director, Stanley J. Seeger Center ’52 for Hellenic Studies

Beatrice Kitzinger

Associate Professor of Art and Archaeology

Michael F. Laffan

Paula Chow Professor in International and Regional Studies; Professor of History

David S. Magier (Sits with Committee)

Associate University Librarian for Scholarly Collections and Research Services

Daniel J. Sheffield

Interim Director, Sharmin and Bijan MossavarRahmani Center for Iran and Persian Gulf Studies (Fall 2022); Associate Professor of Near Eastern Studies

Max Weiss

Associate Professor of History

MRC manager and her partner help visiting fellow Jennifer Jenkins and her husband, Mohamad TavakoliTargi, wrap up Jenkins’ time in Princeton.

Affiliated Faculty

Divya Cherian

Assistant Professor of History

Christopher Chyba

Professor of Astrophysical Sciences; Dwight D. Eisenhower Professor in International Affairs

Michael Cook

Class of 1943 University Professor of Near Eastern Studies; Former Interim Director, Sharmin and Bijan Mossavar-Rahmani Center for Iran and Persian Gulf Studies (2018–19)

Julia Elyachar

Associate Professor of Anthropology and the Princeton Institute for International and Regional Studies

Michael Flower

David Magie ’97 Class of 1897 Professor of Classics

Molly Greene

Professor of History and Hellenic Studies;

Bernard Haykel

Professor of Near Eastern Studies; Director, Institute for Transregional Study of the Contemporary Middle East, North Africa and Central Asia

Stephen Kotkin

John P. Birkelund ’52 Professor in History and International Affairs, Emeritus

Satyel Larson

Assistant Professor of Near Eastern Studies

Michael A. Reynolds

Associate Professor of Near Eastern Studies; Co-Director, Program in the History and Practice of Diplomacy

Daniel J. Sheffield

Associate Professor of Near Eastern Studies

Jack Tannous

Associate Professor of History

Moulie Vidas

Associate Professor of Religion and the Program in Judaic Studies

Muhammed Qasim Zaman

Robert H. Niehaus ’77 Professor of Near Eastern Studies and Religion

Advisory Council Members

Olga Merck Davidson

Research Fellow, Institute for the Study of Muslim Societies and Civilizations, Boston University

Alexander Farman-Farmaian Partner, Vice Chairman and Portfolio Manager, Edgewood Management LLC

Michael Fischer

Andrew W. Mellon Professor in the Humanities; Professor of Anthropology and Science and Technology Studies, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Amaney Jamal

Edwards S. Sanford Professor of Politics; Dean, Princeton School of Public and International Affairs

Daniel Kurtzer

S. Daniel Abraham Professor of Middle East Policy Studies, Princeton School of Public and International Affairs

Charles Kurzman

Professor of Sociology, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Bijan Mossavar-Rahmani

Executive Chairman, DNO ASA; Executive Chairman, RAK Petroleum plc; Chairman, Foxtrot International LDC

Sharmin Mossavar-Rahmani

Chief Investment Officer, Consumer and Wealth Management, Goldman Sachs

Elaine Sciolino

Author, Contributing Writer and Former Paris Bureau Chief, The New York Times

Fall 2023 / Calendar of Events

WEDNESDAY SEMINAR SERIES

September 6

Naghmeh Sohrabi, Brandeis University

The Intimate Lives of Books in the 1979 Iranian Revolution

September 13

Firoozeh Kashani-Sabet, University of Pennsylvania

Heroes to Hostages: US-Iran Relations through Race, Gender, and Social Change

September 20

Ciruce Movahedi-Lankarani, University of Southern California

Precarious Petroleum: Volatile Reservoirs, Varied Natural Gas Compositions, and Development in 1960s Iran

September 27

Babak Rahimi, University of California-San Diego

Staging Taʿziyeh: Aryanism, Heritage, and the Shiraz Arts Festival, 1967–1977

October 4

Kusha Sefat, Tehran University

Revolution of Things: The Islamism and Post-Islamism of Objects in Tehran

October 11

Claudia Yaghoobi, University of North CarolinaChapel Hill

The Bridge Between the Homeland and Host Nation

Sharmin and Bijan Mossavar-Rahmani Center for Iran and Persian Gulf Studies

2-S-2 Green Hall

Princeton, NJ 08544 USA

October 18

Saeed Talajooy, University of St Andrews

Iranian Culture in Bahram Beyzaie’s Cinema and Theater

October 25

Azadeh Kian, Université Paris Cité

Rethinking Gender, Ethnicity and Religion in Iran: An Intersectional Approach to National Identity

November 8

Djavad Salehi, Virginia Tech University

Social Inequality Indexes Before and After the Revolution in Iran

November 15

Manami Goto, Akita University, Japan

Reimagining Iranian Cultural Identities: Stories from Emirati Youth

November 29

Dina Esfandiary, Senior Advisor, International Crisis Group (ICG)

New Order in the Gulf, the Rise of the UAE

December 6

Sima Shakhsari, University of Minnesota

What Counts as Violence? Transgender Refugees, Sanctions, and Torture