2019 Election

I received my PhD from Harvard University in History and Middle East Studies in 2005 and decided to give up a scholarly life, move to Paris, and write a novel. To my great surprise, Paris went through Waltham, MA where I joined the Crown Center for Middle East Studies at its moment of birth. I never made it to Paris so I never wrote the novel. Yet, as Associate Director and now Director for Research, I have been part of the leadership of one of the most exciting research centers for the study of the modern Middle East. The skills I developed in those roles alongside my diverse scholarly profile are qualities I hope to bring to the presidency of AIS.
In his history of AIS, Houchang Chehabi notes that the association was founded in 1967 by a number of graduate students, all of whom became prominent scholars in Iranian Studies. It had a fitful start as it was accused of being close to SAVAK, of being against the Shah, of not being political enough, of being too political. It was, and remains, a seemingly contradictory space as it reflects the passions of its time and yet attempts to create a dispassionate forum for the exchange of ideas and knowledge. That push and pull remains in our association and I believe it is one of its strengths.
As its past attests, the association is a meeting ground for the fresh perspectives of graduate students and junior scholars, and the experience and the foundational knowledge of more senior scholars. As more scholars of every period and discipline think beyond the nation-state and place the study of Iran in conversation with new bodies of knowledge, they not only enrich our field but also expand the canvas on which we can, and should, exchange our ideas. To enable this, I will build on the work already begun to increase our membership, build connections to other intellectual communities, and diversify our leadership to reflect where the field is today and where it has the potential to be—in terms of who is studying Iran and the Persianate world, and also the questions they are asking.
In the current political climate, Iranian studies has been cleaved apart. Many of our members who live outside of Iran are unable to visit their main research site and many of our Iranian colleagues are unable to attend our conferences and meetings. The association has ameliorated this divide by holding biennial meetings outside of the US. I will work with membership to find innovative ways to address this cleavage through digital technologies and analog human connections. We need to think of new ways to provide more access to the scholarship of our colleagues in Iran, new ways to think about archives, ethnography, and data, new ways to work collaboratively to counteract the obstacles thrown into our paths. In doing so, I believe AIS could be at the forefront of solutions for scholars who have also been affected by conflicts and politics, and face limited access to archives, field sites, and intellectual exchanges with their global counterparts.   

I am honored to be nominated for president-elect of AIS. I am a life-member of this beloved association. Since my graduate studies at The University of Michigan, I have served on several AIS election and ad-hoc committees. I have also served as the editor of the association's Newsletter (1998–99) and as a book review editor of Iranian Studies (2004–08). I further served as an elected Council Member of the association (2009–11).
At the University of Arizona, where I teach as a professor of Persian and Iranian studies, I have established, and direct, a robust Persian program in the College of Social and Behavioral Sciences. In 2016, I also founded the Roshan Graduate Interdisciplinary Program in Persian and Iranian Studies in the Graduate College.
I have published numerous articles and books (often interdisciplinary in their approach) on issues related to gender, sexuality, ideology, literature (contemporary & classical), history, and language pedagogy including the acclaimed and award-winning The Politics of Writing in Iran: A History of Modern Persian Literature and Modernity, Sexuality, and Ideology in Iran: The Life and Legacy of a Popular Female Artist.
I aspire to bring to the leadership team my organizational and scholarly experiences as well as fresh ideas regarding fundraising, grants, publications, and (inter)disciplinary and geographic expansion of the association, and to work with all members for the excellence of our association.   

Dear AIS Members,
Please accept my name for consideration as a member of the AIS Council.
I have been a member of AIS since 2008 and have participated in the society as an active member. As a member of the AIS Council, should I be honored with being chosen, I will work to advance the interests of the Association for Iranian Studies mission among members of the association and the larger academic community. My goal is to be an active member in all areas the council oversees and help to create a positive and successful council. In recent years, I presented papers at each convention (unless I was doing fieldwork for my dissertation). My interest in Iran and Iranian studies, as well as the surrounding region, has spanned over two decades. My academic and research career began with studying Iran, Afghanistan, and Pakistan in 1998. My Master’s thesis, Myth Objectives: The Social Construct of Narrative Influence in Iran, studied Iranian leaders and their use of the objectives within various myths to win domestic support for their nuclear program. I received the Mina Houton Foundation Award for the scholarly advancement of Iranian language and culture for two years in a row (in 2008-2009).
After receiving my Ph.D. from Rutgers University, I was a Visting Research Collaborator at Princeton University’s Woodrow Wilson School (2013-2015). During much of this time period I was doing fieldwork in Tajikistan and Afghanistan. After this appointment, I served as a Visiting Scholar in the Department of African, Middle Eastern, and South Asian Languages at Rutgers University. During this appointment, I designed a course on Ta’ziyeh, Iranian ritual theater.
My publications include, The Afghan-Central Asia Borderlands: The State and Local Leaders, Routledge (2016). This book was nominated for an International Studies Association ENMISA (Ethnicity, Nationalism, and Migration) Distinguished Book Award. My second book, Local Governance at the Periphery: Informal Organizations in Tajik/Afghan Badakhshan, funded by grants and awards from IREX, American Institute for Afghan Studies, and the University of Illinois (with a grant from USAID) is under contract (and final peer review) with University of Michigan Press. My third book focuses on seven conceptual essays on different aspects in Iran ranging from civil society to the nuclear issue to social media and women’s rights My fourth book is based on my elective, The Iranian Way of War. This book is in the early stages of developed and is under contract with Lexington Press.
For the larger academic community, I serve on the Governing Council of the International Studies Association, Northeast Chapter, the Yale Ferguson Book Award Committee, the Lifetime Scholar and Paper Award Committees for the ISA’s ENMISA Section (2016-2018). I also serve as a peer reviewer for the International Studies Quarterly, The Feminist Journal of International Politics, and the European Journal of International Relations. I have been an invited speaker at Columbia, Harvard, Princeton, University of Kentucky, The Marshall Center, Yale, George Washington University, Salve Regina, and overseas institutions.

I would like to take a more active role in the Association of Iranian Studies as a member of AIS Council. I am willing to be more engaged in the council because, I believe that the association will benefit from the support and contribution of younger faculty who are motivated to provide a fresh and innovative outlook (in) on issues related to their area of expertise. Since I started my doctoral degree in 2009, I have been an active member of the association with regularly attending the biannual conferences and also publishing in Iranian Studies journal. I have been in close contact with members of the association and in my capacity as a young scholar and poet, I have constantly tried to attract more students to the field of Iranian studies through my scholarship or creative work.
I joined the department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations at the University of Pennsylvania in 2017. My position as a full-time faculty in the field of modern Persian literature was reactivated after twenty-five years since the retirement of the late William Hanaway Jr. Since my arrival at Penn, I have been trying to bring Persian Studies back on the map and I believe my involvement with AIS council will be provide me with the opportunity of expanding the AIS academic network here at Penn.
AIS biannual conferences have been one of the most intellectually fulfilling gatherings in the field of Iranian Studies outside the Iranian borders. I am keen to take a more active part as a member of AIS council in attracting the students and young scholars with a higher profile to the field of Persian Studies. Developing a network of creative writers such as novelists and poets who live in diaspora and dedicating panels on the AIS Biannual conferences to literary workshops or creative writing has been one of my goals since I started my higher education in the field of Persian literature. We have one of the most diverse and highly skillful population of Iranian and dual-national creative writers in diaspora who will benefit from such a community.
I am keen to pursue this goal as a council member as a scholar and also as a poet. In 2016, I won the Latifeh Yarshater annual book award and have been very active in the American literary associations and poetry circles. My hope is to share my experience and suggestions as a creative writer with the members of the AIS council and to come up with innovative plans to support and promote the community of creative writers in our association.

I am eager to bring my perspective and experience as an early career anthropologist of Iran to the AIS Council. This is a particularly exciting time for scholarship on Iran, and I believe that the AIS can play an increasingly major role in creating and fostering a community of scholars working on Iran. Such a community can, in turn, serve as a hub and catalyst for mentorship, potential collaborations, and future publications.
Speaking from the perspective of my home discipline, anthropology, groundbreaking ethnographic work has garnered recognition by the Middle Eastern Studies Association this past year, and new books and articles on Iran are being published annually by renowned academic presses. While some of the scholars producing this work know one another personally, there are no established forums for anthropologists of Iran to communicate regularly with another. On a broader scale, scholars of Iran often fall into silos formed around disciplinary and generational divides.
This, I believe, is where AIS can play a major role in supporting the substantive work of individual scholars - by fostering sustained conversations between scholars of Iran from different disciplines and generations. The biennual Iranian Studies conference already represents a unique opportunity for scholars to come together across those divides. However, not all those who work in Iran are always able to attend, and there is ample room to fill in the two-year gap between conferences with other modes of communication. AIS is uniquely positioned to employ existing social media outlets to increase its own presence as a hub of information on the scholarship of Iran, as well as play a larger role in facilitating discussion and dialogue. Crucially, it could support platforms to connect early career scholars at the graduate or faculty levels with more established scholars. Intellectual and professional mentorship is crucial not just in supporting young scholars produce work on Iran, but also in enabling them to find their footing in academic positions, publish their work, and establish their own scholarly networks. By focusing on sustained engagement, AIS can maintain a constant presence in the lives of scholars of Iran.
If I were to serve on the AIS Council, I would raise the possibility of positioning AIS as a community-building organization with others, conduct research into finding viable and sustainable means of making that happen, and follow up with whatever steps necessary. I have ample experience to draw upon in building scholarly communities. In my position as a McDougal Fellow for the Yale Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, I was responsible for creating community through social activities and dialogue among graduate students from vastly different disciplines. As an organizer of the Ethnography and Social Theory Colloquium at Yale, I invited scholars from a range of disciplines involved in ethnographic work, as well as those at very different points in their academic careers, ranging from early graduate students to seasoned tenured faculty, to engage in a weekly colloquium. This year past year, having completed the Faculty Success Program through the National Center for Faculty Development and Diversity, I have become doubly committed to establishing mentorship ties between academics. I look forward to the possibility of bringing these experiences to AIS.

Approaching my third year in a Dual-Language Master’s Program at the University of Texas at Austin, I have had the opportunity to work with experts in the field of Iranian Studies and let my interests blossom. I have continued my studies of Persian for four years and even taken up Turkish in the hopes of mastering Azari as a research language to open myself up to other regions and cultures within Iran. All that to say, I often use articles published in your Iranian Studies Journal for research, identifying trends in scholarship, and my own individual interest in the field.
I find it is an exciting time to be a scholar of Iranian Studies. The field is becoming more diverse, with scholars from a multitude of backgrounds and disciplines coming together to educate the world about the dynamic history, rich culture, and complex political environment that all form the country of Iran. I myself, have been enthralled with the history and languages of Iran since I began my undergraduate studies at the University of Oklahoma. I vividly remember what it felt like to discover the treasures of Iranian Studies for the first time. Now, each year Iranian Studies is pushing the boundaries and making new discoveries.
With the opportunity to be a Graduate Student member of AIS, I would like to see the diversity taking over the field to be reflected in the association. Exploration of sub-altern epistemologies, environmental and trans-national histories, and comparative literature studies are oft mentioned areas of interest amongst Graduate Student scholars of Iran. The field is burgeoning with interest in different disciplines that others are eager to learn from. The voices of the future have much to say and add to the field. I believe I have a well-rounded understanding of what those on their way to a life in Academia have to say and can provide insight into what they are looking for from a scholarly beacon such as AIS.
To finish, thank you all for your consideration of my application. I believe in the transformative power of knowledge and would like to educate future generations, so that they, too, can acquire a greater understanding of one of the world’s most important societies. Organizations such as AIS provide the resources and community necessary to normalize and facilitate an open and more accurate dialogue about Iran in the United States and abroad.

If selected as a student representative for the AIS Council, I hope to use the connection to improve Iranian Studies programming at my own institution, as well as provide a necessary service to the larger Iranian Studies community. As the Graduate Student Researcher at the Middle East Center at University of Pennsylvania, I am directly involved with the coordination, scheduling, and execution of events related to the Middle East on Penn's campus. One of my goals would be to increase the ties between the AIS/AIS affiliated scholars and the University of Pennsylvania, in order to increase the quality and quantity of programs involving Iranian studies on Penn's campus. In addition to ensuring that AIS events, fellowships, and conferences are well publicized to our students, I would also be developing ties with professional academics affiliated with the AIS that I could draw on to sponsor events like talks and conferences at Penn, providing opportunities for exposure and improving the quality of Iranian Studies programming at Penn.
In addition to looking at what I can do in my own backyard, I am also eager to get involved with AIS at this particular point in both the history of the institution and the history of this country. It is no secret that the AIS and other organizations that promote academic freedom regarding Iran and the Middle East are facing serious challenges from the U.S government and from private organizations. Recently, I experienced some of these challenges myself first hand, as the Middle East Center came under fire from the Zionist Organization of America regarding our support for an event by the Israeli program Breaking the Silence. I am eager to support AIS and its efforts to protect academic freedom and the livelihood of those in our profession in any way I can, even if that is simply to fill a role on the Council and take part in the general business and administration of the organization.

I am a third-year PhD student in Global Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. My dissertation project is a comparative diasporic study between Iran, Egypt, and Turkey where I analyze the processes taking place in the homeland that lead to the creation of diasporas. Graduating with a BA in English Literature at the University of Tehran, a MFA in Creative Writing, and now undertaking studies in the pioneering field of Global Studies, I am well-placed to understand a wide range of educational perspectives and academic approaches to the discipline of Iranian Studies. I have been actively involved in the Iranian-American community ever since I arrived in the US five years ago. I served as the president of the Society for Global Scholars, a student-lead organization within the UCSB Global Studies Department. This allowed me to develop my skills of personnel management, task delegation, project management, prioritization initiatives, and academic communications, including writing grant proposals and strengthening the bonds of academic community in tandem with scholar activist networks and civil society organizations. I have also participated in several conferences presenting my other ongoing projects on the literature of the Iranian Diaspora. Through multiple teaching assistant positions, I gained valuable experience in mentoring younger scholars and developed a better understanding of pedagogical methods. At a time when our community is under increasing scrutiny, the AIS can serve as a crucial organization for spreading awareness of our rich culture and heritage and promoting peace and union. I believe I can be a valuable member of the AIS Council as I am committed to advancing the field of Iranian Studies by studying its history and literature and promoting Iranian culture. Leaving Iran in the recent past, I am well-versed in the on-the-ground realities of life in Iran and am able to act as a bridge for a community who still reside there and wish to transcend political barriers. With the skills I have acquired during my Global Studies degree, I am comfortable in working within and across disciplinary boundaries and I believe I can speak to the diverse experiences of the scholars of AIS.