Farzin Vejdani

Dr. Vejdani is an Associate Professor of Middle Eastern History at Toronto Metropolitan University, where he teaches courses on the history of Muslim societies, the modern Middle East, the Ottoman Empire, the Mughal Empire, and Middle Eastern and North African cities. He was a Visiting Fellow at Massey College (2021-2022) and a Visiting Fellow at Harvard Law School’s Program on Law and Society in the Muslim World (external link)  (2019-2020). His book, Private Sins, Public Crimes: Policing, Punishment, and Authority in Iran (external link) , was recently published by Yale University Press (2024). His first book, Making History in Iran: Education, Nationalism, and Print Culture (external link)  (Stanford University Press, 2014) received an Honorable Mention for the Houshang Pourshariati Iranian Studies Book Award (external link)  in 2016. In his other publications, Dr. Vejdani has explored the themes of everyday crime and punishment, folklore, transnational Persian print networks, and connected histories of the Ottoman Empire, India, and Iran. In addition to being the author of several book chapters, he has published numerous articles in Comparative Studies in Society and History, Journal of Social History, the International Journal of Middle East Studies, the Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient, the Journal of Religious History, the Journal of Iranian Studies, 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).