Academic interests
Iranian studies; Gender and Sexuality; Women's Movements; Cyberactivism and Counterpublics; Political Islam; Politics of class, sex, and race; Postcolonial and Feminist Theory; Subaltern Studies
Higher education and employment history
I am a feminist scholar and women's activist who earned a PhD in Iranian Studies in 2013 from the Department of Middle Eastern, South Asian and African Studies at Columbia University in New York City. I also completed two Master's degrees in Human Rights and Middle Eastern Studies in 2004 and 2007, respectively, at the same institution. In New York, I am an Associate Faculty-at-large at the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research (BISR), where I teach primarily online courses on feminism and empire, sexuality, Gayatri Spivak's corpus, and political Islam. Before arriving to Oslo, from 2016-2017 I was a postdoctoral research fellow at the Institute of Religion, Culture and Public Life (IRCPL) at Columbia University, where I was affiliated as Senior Research Scholar until 2019. From 2014-2016, I held a visiting lectureship at Leiden University Institute for Area Studies in the Netherlands and has previously taught for the WEB DuBois Scholar's Institute at Princeton University. I have also interned at UNIFEM, The Economist Intelligence Unit, and other NGOs in New York and Tehran.
My research has focused on contemporary women's movements, sexuality, and gendered public space in Iran and the modern Middle East. I am currently working on two projects germane to (Iranian) diaspora political entrepreneurs and golden visa investment schemes in the Middle East.
I have co-organized and managed two separate international conference series on populism and pluralism (2017-2019) that took place in Amman, Tunis, Paris, and New York with the IRCPL and the University of Groningen. I have also presented my work at many conferences in the United States, Europe and the Middle East. Recent publications on sexuality, government morality, cyberfeminism, and women's activism in Iran can be found in the Journal of Anthropology of the Middle East, Gender and sexualities in Muslim Cultures, Feminist Media Histories Journal, and the Journal of the Society for Contemporary Thought and the Islamicate World. My monograph Revolutionary Bodies: Technologies of Gender, Sex, and Self in Contemporary Iran was published by Bloomsbury in January 2021.
I am an original member of the Theory of the Margins Collective, based in Oslo, and the founder and member of the Digging Collective.
Awards, Fellowships, and Grants
-
Independent Research Fund Denmark 2023-2026, "Iran beyond Iran: Diasporic Politics, Transnational Entanglement, and Digital Publics," Co-PI
-
President's Global Innovation Fund 2017, "Religion & the Rise of Populisms: Difference, Dissent, and Tolerance," Institute for Religion, Culture and Public Life, Columbia University
-
Whiting Foundation Dissertation Fellowship 2011-2012 https://www.whiting.org/scholars/past-programs
-
Columbia University Graduate School of Arts and Science Jackson Fellowship 2008-09
-
US Department of Education Foreign Language and Area Studies Summer Fellowship 2006
-
Columbia University, Middle East, South Asian, and African Studies Department Summer Travel & Research Fellowship 2005, 2007-11
-
Houtan Foundation Scholarship 2005
Courses Taught
Iran in the World MØNA 2505
Persian E PER3010
Theories & Methods of the Middle East MES4000
Topics in Middle East Politics & Society: Gender & Revolutions: Rethinking the "Women Question" in the Modern Middle East MES4500
Voices from the Middle East: How to Communicate Research Results MES4610
Master's Thesis in Middle East Studies MES4590
Fieldwork in the Middle East MES4020
(Persian) Readings of the Middle East MES4110