New Books in Iranian Studies

The enterprise of journalism is in crisis. Today’s journalists face accusations of “fake news” on the one hand, and harassment, arrest, and even the murder of reporters on the other. At the same time, we who rely on journalists for information, are constantly bombarded by breaking news. Confronted by video and print updates in real time, it is increasingly challenging to keep up with, let alone un...

In History of the Tajiks: Iranians of the East(I.B. Tauris, 2019), Richard Foltz provides a comprehensive cultural, political, and linguistic history of the Tajik people. Throughout the book, he traces the history of this Persian-speaking Iranian ethnic group, starting with the pre-historic groups who first settled in the regions of contemporary Tajikistan, Afghanistan, and Uzbekistan, and ending...

How do peripheral places assert the centrality of their identity? Why are fanciful events, like dreams and myths, useful narrative elements for identity construction and arguments about authority, legitimacy, and rhetoric? In Authority and Identity in Medieval Islamic Historiography: Persian Histories from the Periphery (Cambridge University Press, 2017), Mimi Hanaoka, Associate Professor of Relig...

In her newest book, Roving Revolutionaries: Armenians and the Connected Revolutions in the Russian, Iranian and Ottoman Worlds (University of California Press, 2019), Dr. Houri Berberian uses a transnational or transimperial approach to examine the interconnectedness of 1905 Russian Revolution, the Iranian Revolution and the Young Turk Revolution and the role that Armenian revolutionaries played i...

In recent years, the concept of a ‘Cold War’ has been revived to describe the rivalry between Saudi Arabia and Iran, the two most influential states occupying positions of geopolitical importance in the Persian Gulf, who lay claim to leadership over the Islamic world. In the years after the 1979 revolution in Iran, the two states became embroiled in a rivalry that risked consuming the region, divi...

Winner of the Middle East Studies Association’s 2018 Albert Hourani Book Award, Alireza Doostdar’s The Iranian Metaphysicals: Explorations in Science, Islam, and the Uncanny (Princeton University Press, 2018) is a mesmerizing study of discourses and practices surrounding the Occult sciences or ‘metaphysicals’ in contemporary Iran. Thoroughly disrupting the common association of the Occult with pop...

In his sparkling new book, “Mysticism” in Iran: The Safavid Roots of a Modern Concept (University of South Carolina Press, 2017), Ata Anzali, Assistant Professor of Religion at Middlebury College, offers a sweeping and brilliant intellectual history of the concept of ‘Irfan in medieval, early Modern, and modern contexts. Combining a mesmerizingly layered analysis of previously unexplored manuscrip...

Mehrzad Boroujerdi and Kourosh Rahimkhani‘s new book, Postrevolutionary Iran: A Political Handbook (Syracuse University Press, 2017), traces the political events that mark almost four decades of revolutionary rule and includes biographies of the 2,300 most important political players in the Islamic republic. The book is certain to be a must-have reference for anyone researching post-revolutionary...

Over the past century, virtually every Iranian—whether living in Iran or in the diaspora—has been exposed, to one degree or another, to certain commonly held nationalistic beliefs about what it means to be Iranian. These beliefs include the idea that Iranians are an “Aryan” race; that pre-Islamic Iran was a sort of golden age, marked by a glorious Persian Empire; and that this pure Iranian “soul”...

Kevan Harris is the author of A Social Revolution: Politics and the Welfare State in Iran (University of California Press, 2017). Harris is assistant professor of sociology at the University of California, Los Angeles. Much scholarship has focused on understanding the Iranian revolution of 1979, especially in relation to other nations in the Middle East and those further away in the West. The Isla...

How does a group become defined as white? And does that group define themselves that way as well? Neda Maghbouleh‘s new book, The Limits of Whiteness: Iranian Americans and the Everyday Politics of Race (Stanford University Press, 2017), uses interview and ethnographic data to better understand how Iranian Americans perceive themselves and are perceived. “Caught in the chasm between formal ethno-r...

Iranian cinema has close connections to the 1979 Islamic revolution. Ayatollah Khomeini , explicitly pointed to the uses of cinema for religious and revolutionary political purposes. But Iranian films and the means of film production gradually changed in the post-Khomeini period. In Reform Cinema in Iran: Film and Political Change in the Islamic Republic (Columbia University Press, 2016), Blake At...

How did the preeminent theorist and philosopher Michel Foucault experience and observe the Iranian revolution? How did he find the revolution disruptive of a teleological notion of history? And how did the Iranian revolution impact and shape Foucault’s thought? These are among the questions addressed by Behrooz Ghamari-Tabrizi in his exciting new book Foucault in Iran: Islamic Revolution after the...

In Rabbis, Sorcerers, Kings, and Priests: The Culture of the Talmud in Ancient Iran (University of California Press, 2015), Jason Mokhtarian, Assistant Professor of Jewish Studies and Religious Studies at the Indiana University, puts the Babylonian Talmud in its Persian context. He lays out a research program for Talmud studies that is contextual, rather than literary or exegetical. Analyzing refe...

In her fascinating new book Professing Selves: Transsexuality and Same-Sex Desire in Contemporary Iran (Duke University Press, 2015), Afsaneh Najmabadi, Professor of History and of Studies of Women, Gender, and Sexuality at Harvard University, explores shifting meanings of transsexuality in contemporary Iran. By brilliantly combining historical and ethnographic inquiry, Najmabadi highlights the co...

While “fundamentalism” and “authoritarian secularism” are commonly perceived as the two mutually exclusive paradigms available to Muslim majority countries Naser Ghobadzadeh‘s new book Religious Secularity: A Theological Challenge to the Islamic State (Oxford UP, 2014) highlights the recent political developments that challenge this binary perception. Ghobadzadeh examines the case of Iran which ha...

In Doing Psychoanalysis in Tehran (MIT Press, 2012) — part memoir, part elegy, and part collection of clinical vignettes — Gohar Homayounpour takes a defiant position against the Orientalizing gaze of Western publishers, editors, and journalists who search in her book for the exotic Iranian subject and the trauma of the Eastern Other. She turns a critical eye on the expectation that she perform an...

In the summer of 2009, Shane Bauer, Joshua Fattal, and Sarah Shourd were hiking in Iraqi Kurdistan when they unknowingly crossed into Iran and were captured by a border patrol. Accused of espionage, the three Americans ultimately found themselves in Tehran’s infamous Evin Prison, where they discovered that pooling their strength of will and relying on each other were the only ways they could survi...

Sarah Bowen Savant, Associate Professor at the Institute for the Study of Muslim Civilisations at the Aga Khan University in London, addresses important questions about conversion among Persian peoples from the ninth to eleventh century CE in her work The New Muslims of Post-Conquest Iran: Tradition, Memory, and Conversion (Cambridge University Press, 2013). Memory is the centerpiece of her study....

Marc Ambinder is the author, with D.B. Grady, of Deep State: Inside the Government Secrecy Industry (Wiley, 2013). He is a contributing editor at GQ and The Atlantic magazine, and has served as White House Correspondent for National Journal. His new book investigates executive power and the role secrets play in US policy making. He weaves together eye-opening stories with a larger meditation on tr...

In The Politics of Nationalism in Modern Iran (Cambridge University Press, 2012), Ali Ansari traces the nationalist movement in Iran from the Tobacco Revolt of 1891 up to the current government led by president Ahmadinejad. Ansari explains how the events of the early 20th century led to the more well known events of Iran’s recent history, providing detailed insight into the key people that have be...

How do ideologies shape foreign policy? That is question Dr. Mark Haas examines in his new book The Clash of Ideologies: Middle Eastern Politics and American Security (Oxford University Press, 2012). The book analyzes how ideologies shape the perceptions and actions of governments, and specifically the impact this has on relations between the US and the Middle East. Dr. Haas examines two key varia...

If you ask most Americans when the U.S. became heavily involved in the Persian Gulf, they might cite the Iranian Hostage Crisis of 1981 or, more probably, the First Gulf War of 1990. Of course the roots of American entanglement in the region run much deeper, as W. Taylor Fain shows in his excellent new book American Ascendance and British Retreat in the Persian Gulf Region (Palgrave-Macmillan, 200...