2018 Election

Matthew P. Canepa (PhD, University of Chicago) is Professor of Art History and Elahé Omidyar Mir-Djalali Presidential Chair in Art History and Archaeology of Ancient Iran at University of California, Irvine. An historian of art, archaeology and religions his research focuses on the intersection of art, ritual and power in the eastern Mediterranean, Persia and the wider Iranian world. He is a faculty member in University of California, Irvine’s Department of Art History and Ph.D. Program in Visual Studies and affiliated faculty member of the Department of Classics. Professor Canepa is an active contributor to UC Irvine’s Samuel Jordan Center for Persian Studies and Culture. His most recent book is entitled The Iranian Expanse: Transforming Royal Identity through Landscape, Architecture, and the Built Environment (550 BCE – 642 CE) (University of California Press, 2018). It is a large-scale study of the transformation of Iranian cosmologies, landscapes and architecture from the height of the Achaemenids to the coming of Islam. His other publications include The Two Eyes of the Earth: Art and Ritual of Kingship between Rome and Sasanian Iran (University of California Press, 2009; paperback ed. 2017), which was was awarded the 2010 James Henry Breasted Prize from the American Historical Association for the best book in English on any field of history prior to the year 1000 CE. He is an elected Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries of London, and has been the recipient of numerous research fellowships including from The Getty Research Institute (2019 and 2013), The Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton and The John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation (2015-2016). He has been invited as visiting faculty at Merton College, University of Oxford and L’École Pratique des Hautes Études, Paris.

Simcha Gross studies religious minorities in Iran from late antiquity through the middle ages. He is currently Assistant Professor of Late Antique Judaism at University of California, Irvine. He received his Ph.D. in Religious Studies at Yale University in 2017. His current projects center on the experience of Jews and Syriac Christians under the Sasanian Empire, and on the effect of 9th-12th century Persian literature on medieval rabbinic historiography. His recent articles include "Irano-Talmudica and Beyond: Next Steps in the Contextualization of the Babylonian Talmud," in which he argued for the importance of the Sasanian Empire for understanding the Babylonian Talmud; "Rethinking Babylonian Rabbinic Acculturation in the Sasanian Empire," which challenges older notions that Babylonian Jewish rabbis were opposed to Persian language and culture; and "The Curious Case of the Jewish Sasanian Queen Šīšīnduxt," which argues that a story in a medieval Middle Persian Zoroastrian source reflects Jewish propaganda generated by the cultural trends sometimes known as the "Iranian Intermezzo." He is editing a special issue of Studies in Late Antiquity, titled “The Crucible of Empire: The Sasanian World and its Religious Minorities."

I am an Assistant Professor of History at Emory & Henry College and a specialist on the history of American-Iranian relations during the twentieth century. After receiving my Ph.D. from Temple University in 2013, I published my first book with Cornell University Press in 2017. It is titled Losing Hearts and Minds: American-Iranian Relations and International Education during the Cold War, and I argue for the primacy of cultural exchanges with and student migration to the United States in shaping transnational debates about “modernization” and “rights” in Pahlavi Iran. I am editing a second book that is forthcoming in 2020 with Bloomsbury Press titled American-Iranian Dialogues: An International History from Constitution to White Revolution that includes important contributions from AIS members and scholars from other professional organizations on the cultural ties between Iran and the United States. In addition to these projects, I have original research articles published in Iranian Studies, Diplomatic History, International History Review, and The Sixties. Beyond research, I have translated my interest in pedagogy into service on the Teaching Committee of the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations. I am especially interested in new frameworks and interdisciplinary methods for using our collective scholarship to engage the next generation of students and the broader public about Iran’s historic relationship with the United States and the world.

Rose Wellman is an anthropologist who specializes in Iran and the Middle East. Between 2007 and 2010, she conducted 15 months of ethnographic research in the Islamic Republic, including 10 months in a small town outside of Shiraz. The result is her forthcoming book, tentatively titled Feeding Iran: Shi’i Families and the Making of an Islamic Republic. In addition to her monograph, Rose is the author of Sacralizing Kinship, Naturalizing the Nation: Blood and Food in Postrevolutionary Iran” published in American Ethnologist, and she is the co-editor with Dr. Todne Thomas and Dr. Asiya Malik of New Directions of Spiritual Kinship: Sacred Ties across the Abrahamic Religions (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017). Rose received her Ph.D. from the University of Virginia in 2014, held a postdoctoral research position at Princeton University’s Center for Iran and Persian Gulf Studies between 2014 and 2017, and is currently an assistant professor of anthropology at the University of Michigan-Dearborn.