Farzin Vejdani

Dr. Vejdani’s primary research focuses on nationalist historiography in Iran during the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-centuries. His recently-published book with Stanford University Press, Making History in Iran: Education, Nationalism, and Print Culture (external link)  (2014), investigates how cultural institutions and a growing public-sphere affected history-writing, and how in turn this writing defined Iranian nationalism. In 2016, it received an Honorable Mention for the Houshang Pourshariati Iranian Studies Book Award (external link) . In his other publications, Dr. Vejdani has explored the themes of folklore, everyday urban crime, transnational Persian print networks, and connected histories of the Ottoman Empire, India, and Iran. In addition to being the author of three book chapters, he has published articles in the International Journal of Middle East Studies, the Journal of Religious History, the Journal of Persianate Studies, the International Journal of Turkish Studies, the British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies, and Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East. He is also the co-editor of Iran Facing Others: Identity Boundaries in a Historical Perspective (external link)  (2012). For his current research project, Dr. Vejdani explores the intersection of space, crime, and the law in the everyday lives of ordinary people in nineteenth-century Iran. He teaches courses on the history of Muslim societies, the modern Middle East, the Ottoman Empire, and Middle Eastern and North African cities.