AIS Election 2011

Julie Ellison-Speight is a PhD Candidate in Iranian Studies at the University of Arizona. Her dissertation “Women and Social Conditions in Early Twentieth Century Iran: The Life of Sediqeh Dowlatabadi” utilizes Dowlatabadi’s life as a lens to analyze how women’s education led to their anjumans, writings in the press, and their connections with transnational women’s movements during the first half of the twentieth century. Since 2002, she has served as a teaching associate and instructor for many Middle Eastern Studies Courses. Throughout her graduate career she has been involved with the Middle East North Africa Graduate Student Organization in varying leadership positions. These leadership roles gave her a large amount of experience in conference organization. During the 2004-5 academic year while finishing her MA thesis about Women’s Movements in Egypt, Algeria and Iran, she worked for a year at the Center for Middle Eastern Studies. During this period, she gained experience in grant writing and gave outreach talks. Simultaneously she started working at MESA where she assisted in many office activities and developed databases and spreadsheets to better assist the office staff in the running of the annual conference. She began working at the MESA Conference Help Desk in 2006 and gained experience with the logistics of putting on a large academic conference. She is very aware of the issues that academic associations devoted to Middle Eastern Studies are confronted with in the current environment. Her academic interests and prior work experience uniquely qualify Julie for an AIS board member position which will allow her to better assist the interests of academics devoted to Iranian Studies.

Maral Jefroudi is a PhD candidate of History at the Leiden University Institute for Area Studies and Research Fellow at the International Institute of Social History, Amsterdam. She studied Political Science and International Relations, and Sociology at Bogazici University, Istanbul and graduated with a High Honors double-major BA degree in 2006. She obtained her MA degree at the Ataturk Institute for Modern Turkish History, BU with her thesis entitled "A Re-Politicized History of Iranian Transit Migrants Passing Through Turkey in the 1980s." She worked as a student assistant at the Political Science Department from 2005 to 2006 and as an instructor at the Ataturk Institute from 2008 to 2010. Maral received the Yale University MacMillan Center, Fox International Fellowship for 2009-2010. She translated Gavkhouni and Man ta Sobh Bidaram by Jafar Modarres Sadeghi into Turkish (compiled under the title Ben Sabaha Kadar Uyanigim). Since October 2010 she is writing a PhD thesis on the social history of labor in the Iranian Oil Industry in the Consortium period. She was born in Tehran and grew up in Istanbul. Maral is a member of the 2012 Biennial Conference Committee, and is the Chair of the Book Exhibition Committee.

Mikiya Koyagi is a Ph.D. candidate in History at the University of Texas at Austin and specializes in the social and cultural history of modern Iran and the Middle East. Born and raised in Japan, he has bachelor’s degrees from Hitotsubashi University in Tokyo and the University of Texas at Austin. Koyagi went on to pursue his Master of Arts in Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Texas and wrote a thesis about male and female physical education and scouting in the Reza Shah period. In his dissertation, he writes a social history of new modes of transportation in modern Iran. It examines the nationalist discourse surrounding transportation, the impact of new modes of transportation such as railroads and automobiles on the center-periphery relationship, and the implications of increased mobility in urban space. His other scholarly interests include: gender, nationalism, transnational movements, Japan and the Islamic World, and world history. He has presented at both local and international academic conferences, including the Middle East Studies Association Conference in 2007 and 2008, and the Iranian Studies Conference in 2010. He will also be presenting at the 2011 MESA Conference and the 2012 AIS Conference. Koyagi’s publications have appeared in History Compass (“Modern Education in Iran during the Qajar and Pahlavi Periods”) and the International Journal of the History of Sport (“Moulding Future Soldiers and Mothers of the Iranian Nation: Gender and Physical Education under Reza Shah, 1921-1941”). He has worked in a number of history courses as a teaching assistant and taught intermediate Persian as an assistant instructor.

Shabnam Rahimi-golkhandan is a second year Masters student in the University of Toronto's Department of Near and Middle Eastern Civilizations. She received her Bachelors of Arts from the Department of Art History at the University of Toronto. For the past few years she has focused her research on the early history of graphic arts and advertisement in Iran, aiming to develop a historiographical framework for the study of print industry and mass circulation of graphic arts in late nineteenth/early twentieth century in Iran. She has presented a paper on the topic in the AIS conference of 2010 in Santa Monica and she will be presenting another in the 2012 conference. She will also present her paper as part of a panel in the Middle East Studies Association conference of 2011. Shabnam is projected to complete her Master of Arts in June of 2012 with a thesis on the early history of graphic arts in Iran. Her research interests, largely centered on the transformations of the role of images in the shaping of the urban culture of Iran, focuses on the history of advertising industry and the production of mass-culture. Shabnam worked on the graphic design of the 2010 AIS Biennial Program and she is currently the Assistant Editor of IranNameh. At the beginning of 2012, she will embark on a nine-month research project at the Freer Gallery of Art and the Arthur M. Sackler Gallery on early twentieth century Iranian photographs.

Sahba Shayani is currently a fourth year Iranian Studies Ph.D. student at the UCLA Department of Near Eastern Languages and Cultures. In 2008, Sahba graduated cum laude from UCLA, where he received his B.A. in English with a minor in Near Eastern Languages and Cultures. He completed his M.A. in Iranian Studies in 2011 and is now working on his dissertation prospectus. His field of study is Persian language and literature, with a special interest in the life and works of the nineteenth century martyr-poet, Tāhirih Qurratu’l-‘Ayn. Sahba presented at the 8th Biennial AIS Conference in Santa Monica in 2010 and will present at the 2012 AIS Conference. He is the recipient of several scholarships and fellowships, among them the Foreign Language and Area Studies (FLAS) Fellowship in Arabic. As a Teaching Assistant in the Iranian Studies program at UCLA, Sahba teaches his own elementary-level Persian language class for non-heritage students. He was a Teaching Assistant for an intensive intermediate and advanced Persian course in summer of 2009.  He is currently working with two professors on a grant and related project regarding the use of multimedia and the Internet as a means of teaching elementary and intermediate level Persian. He has served as a liaison between his program, the student population, and the larger Iranian community. Sahba served as a coordinator for registration at the 2010 AIS Biennial.