School of Humanities and Sciences
Showing 11-16 of 16 Results
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Negar Mottahedeh
Visiting Professor, Iranian Studies
BioI am a cultural critic and theorist specializing in interdisciplinary contributions to the fields of Middle Eastern Studies and Film & Media Studies. I have published five books on Iranian Cinema, the history of reform, revolution and the uses of various media in protest. My book "#iranelection: Hashtag Solidarity and the Transformation of Online Life" (Stanford University Press, 2015) is about one such social media mobilization. "#iranelection" follows the protest movement around Iran's fraudulent presidential election in 2009 to investigate how the emerging social media platforms of the era developed as a result of the international solidarity around the hashtag. Just as the world turned to social media platforms to understand the events on the ground, social media platforms adapted and developed to accommodate global activism. "#iranelection" reveals the new online ecology of social protest and offers a prehistory, of sorts, to the uses of hashtags and trending topics, of selfies and avatar activism, citizen journalism and YouTube mashups.
My most recent book Whisper Tapes: Kate Millett in Iran (Stanford UP, 2019) which was translated into Persian and published by Naakojaa Press in 2026 draws on The Kate Millett papers in the Sallie Bingham Center for Women’s History & Culture in the Duke archives to recover the lost history of the women’s protests that followed quickly on the heels of Ayatollah Khomeini’s ascent to power as the leader of the Iranian Revolution. Less than a month after the Iranian Revolution of 1979, the American feminist Kate Millett traveled to Tehran to join Iranian women in a celebration of International Women’s Day. As the celebration turned into six days of demonstrations, Millett’s picture appeared in major International newspapers as a participant. She was pictured holding a small tape recorder. These tapes, Millett’s “whisper tapes,” captured the soundscape of a flickering (and unfettered) moment of revolutionary vitality that spawned imaginative narratives and theories among feminists around the world. As I listened to Millett's audio tapes and in between the often contradictory layering of voices and sounds captured on them, I began writing the Whisper Tapes as a playful interpretive guide for Millett in retrospect – a guide to the demands of postrevolutionary Iran in 32 entries following the 32 letters of the Persian alphabet, introducing the reader to the Revolution’s slogans, its habits, its instincts, its foods, its monuments, its collectivism, its cast of characters and importantly to the Iranian women’s movement—a movement some have claimed Millett herself never quite grasped.
Here's a link to the book in Persian translation:
https://shorturl.at/1pEBa -
Ashkan Nazari
Ph.D. Student in Music, admitted Autumn 2023
Iranian Studies Student Assistant, Iranian StudiesBioAshkan Nazari
Degrees / Education
M.A., Ethnomusicology, Tehran University of Art, Tehran, 2016
B.A., Music, University of Tehran, Tehran, 2012
A Kurdish-Iranian musician, multi-instrumentalist, improviser, composer, and researcher, Ashkan is currently a PhD candidate in ethnomusicology and a doctoral certificate student in composition at Stanford University. Ashkan’s compositional work draws on the Iranian dastgāh system and Kurdish maqām idioms, while his practice at Stanford engages contemporary and experimental compositional approaches.
Ashkan’s more than 15-year research career has centered on Kurdish classical and folk musics as well as Iranian classical music. At Stanford, his work explores intersections between music and genocide, war, violence, intellectual movements, Islam, and Kurdish identity. He is also interested in developing decolonial ethnographic approaches to maqām as a cultural–musical practice and concept, particularly in relation to ethnicity and racism.
In his quest to explore those realms, Ashkan has already been prolific back home, with two titles: The Concept and Structure of Maqām in Kurdish Music, The Structure of Musical Modes in Hawrāmi Music. His articles have appeared in leading Iranian journals, and he has presented his research at international ethnomusicology conferences.
As the founder and conductor of the first philharmonic orchestra in his Kurdish hometown of Paveh, Ashkan has also taught Iranian music theory and directed Iranian ensembles, and has instructed setār performance and the analysis of Iranian classical music at the University of Kurdistan and the University of Art and Culture in Kermanshah and Sanandaj, respectively. -
C. Ryan Perkins
Curator for South Asian Studies and Islamic Studies, Humanities Resource Group
Current Role at StanfordAs the Curator for South Asian and Islamic Studies I am responsible for building the library's collection of materials from and about South Asia and the Islamic world in English, European languages, and languages of the Middle East, Central Asia, and South Asia. This involves building and sustaining a network of antiquarian dealers, book vendors, scholars, publishers, and libraries in South Asia, Central Asia, and the Middle East. Apart from responding to faculty teaching needs I work in collaboration with the South Asia Center, the Abbasi Program in Islamic Studies, and their affiliates to provide research assistance to faculty, students, and other library users. I also oversee the Bahai collection.
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Ali Yaycioglu
Associate Professor of History
BioAli Yaycioglu is a historian of the Ottoman Empire and Modern Turkey. His research centers on economic, political and legal institutions and practices as well as social and cultural life in southeastern Europe and the Middle East during the Ottoman Empire. He also has a research agenda on how people imagined, represented and recorded property, territory, and nature in early periods. Furthermore, Yaycioglu explores how we can use digital tools to understand, visualize and conceptualize these imaginations, representations and recordings. Yaycioglu’s first book, Partners of the Empire: Crisis of the Ottoman Order in the Age of Revolutions (Stanford University Press, 2016) offers a rethinking of the Ottoman Empire within the global context of the revolutionary age in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Currently Dr. Yaycioglu is working on a book project entitled The Ultimate Debt: State, Wealth and Death in the Ottoman Empire, in which he analyzes transformations in property, finance and statehood in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Ali Yaycioglu is the supervisor of a digital history project, Mapping Ottoman Epirus housed in Stanford’s Center for Spatial and Textual Analysis.
