Iran: Between a Rock and a Hard Place
The ECMC Chair in Islamic Studies, the Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies, and the Department of Political Science at the University of Alberta cordially invite you to attend a Zoom webinar entitled:
Iran: Between a Rock and a Hard Place
This virtual panel will feature scholars of Iranian Studies and will take place on:
Friday, February 6, at 6:00 PM (MST)
Zoom Webinar, Free Registration: Here
* Afshin Matin-Asgari (California State University): Iran's Popular Protests amidst US Sanctions and Military Intervention
* Siavash Saffari (Seoul National University): Do Iranian People Need Saving?
* Setareh Shohadaei (New York University): Iran and the Manufacturing of the Desire for War
* Peyman Vahabzadeh (University of Victoria): On the Uprising in Iran and Its Possibilities
* Mojtaba Mahdavi (University of Alberta): The Islamist Emperor Has No Clothes: Iran's Post-Islamist Civil Society Confronting the Islamist State
Bios.
* Professor Afshin Matin-Asgari is a Professor of Middle East History at California State University, Los Angeles. He is the author of Axis of Empire: A History of Iran-US Relations (Verso 2026); Both Eastern and Western: AN Intellectual History of Iranian Modernity (Cambridge
* Professor Siavash Saffari is a Professor of West Asian Studies at Seoul National University. His monograph, Beyond Shariati: Modernity, Cosmopolitanism and Islam in Iranian Political Thought (Cambridge University Press, 2017), received the 2018 Foundations of Political Theory First Book Award from APSA. He is also the co-editor of Unsettling Colonial Modernity in Islamicate Contexts (2017) and Spirit and Defiance: Ali Shariati in Translation (forthcoming).
* Dr. Setareh Shohadaei is a Postdoctoral Faculty Fellow at the Department of Liberal Studies at New York University. Her upcoming manuscript, Losing Like a Girl: Feminist Grief and the Phallicism of Identity Politics, examines how feminine forms of mourning can open pathways beyond those offered by alt-right, neoliberal, and intersectional identity politics.
* Professor Peyman Vahabzadeh is a Professor of Sociology at University of Victoria. He is the author of several books including For Land and Culture: The Grassroots Council Movement of Turkmens in Iran, 1979-1980 (Fernwood 2024); The Art of Defiance: Dissident Culture and Militant Resistance in 1970s Iran (Edinburgh University Press, 2022); Violence and Nonviolence: Conceptual Excursions into Phantom Opposites (University of Toronto Press, 2019); A Rebel’s Journey: Mostafa Sho‘aiyan and Revolutionary Theory in Iran (OneWorld, 2019); and A Guerrilla Odyssey: Modernization, Secularism, Democracy and the Fadai Discourse of National Liberation in Iran, 1971-1979 (Syracuse University Press, 2010).
* Professor Mojtaba Mahdavi is a Professor of Political Science and the ECMC Chair in Islamic Studies at the University of Alberta. He is the editor of The Myth of Middle East Exceptionalism: Unfinished Social Movements (Syracuse University Press, 2023); co-editor of Rethinking China, the Middle East and Asia in a "Multiplex World" (Brill 2022); co-editor of Towards the Dignity of Difference: Neither ‘End of History’ nor ‘Clash of Civilizations’ (Routledge 2012); and guest editor of The Many Faces of Contemporary Post-Islamism (Religions, 2021) and Contemporary Social Movements in the Middle East and Beyond (Sociology of Islam, 2014).
