Empires and Revolutions: Iranian-Russian Encounters since 1800

Alphabetical by Surname of the Speaker

Biography of a number of speakers are missing from the list below. These will be added as and when they become available.

 

Firuza Abdullaeva  is a graduate of the Iranian Philology Department, Faculty of Oriental Studies, St Petersburg University, she received her PhD in Iranian philology and Islamic Studies with her thesis on the earliest Persian Commentary on the Qur'an (Tafsir-i Qur'an Pak) in 1989. She was an Associate Professor at the University of St Petersburg when she joined the Cambridge Shahnama Project in 2002. Since 2005 she has been Lecturer in Persian Literature at the University of Oxford and Fellow and Curator of the Firdousi Library of Wadham College. Her main research interests include Classical and Modern Persian literature, Muslim codicology and Medieval Persian book art. Her interest in Qajar history and literature started from her research on the Diary of Mustafa Afshar (Safar-nama-yi Pitirzburg), when she was working on the catalogue of the Persian manuscripts of St Petersburg University.

 

Elena Andreeva is Associate Professor of History at Virginia Military Institute.  Her research focuses on the interaction between East and West, Iranian history and culture in the 19th and early 20th centuries, and aspects of colonialism and imperialism in the Middle East and Asia. She has published, among other works, Russia and Iran in the Great Game:  Travelogues and Orientalism (2007).  Her current project examines the "Orient" in Russian arts, including music, paintings and literature.

 

Touraj Atabaki  is Professor of the Social History of the Middle East and Central Asia at the University of Leiden and Senior Research Fellow at the International Institute of Social History. He is the author of Azerbaijan: Ethnicity and the Struggle for Power in Iran (London: I.B. Tauris, 1993), Beyond Essentialism. Who writes whose Past in the Middle East and Central Asia? (Amsterdam: Aksant, 2003), editor of Post-Soviet Central Asia (London: I.B. Tauris, 1998), co-editor, with Erik Jan Zürcher, of Men of Order, Authoritarian Modernisation in Turkey and Iran (London: I.B. Tauris, 2004) and co-editor, with Sanjyot Mehendale, of Central Asia and the Caucasus: Transnationalism and Diaspora (London and New York: Routledge, 2005), Iran and the First World War: Battleground of the Great Powers (London: I.B. Tauris, 2006), The State and the Subaltern: Society and Politics in Turkey and Iran (London: I.B. Tauris, 2007) and Iran in the Twentieth Century. Historiography and Political Culture (London: I.B. Tauris, 2009). His current work focuses on the labour history of Iran and the comparative historiography of Iran and Central Asia since the nineteenth century.

 

Muriel Atkin, is professor of history at George Washington University. Professor Atkin received her doctorate in history from Yale University.  Her areas of research interest are modern Central Asia, the Muslim peoples of Russia and the USSR, and Russian and Soviet relations with Iran.  Her written work includes: Central Asia and the Caucasus from the First World War,@ New Cambridge History of Islam, (forthcoming);  "Tajikistan: the status of Islam since 1917," Encyclopædia Iranica (2005); "Tajikistan: A President and His Rivals," in Power and Change in Central Asia, S.N.  Cummings, ed. (London: Routledge, 2002), pp. 97-114; "The Rhetoric of Islamophobia," Central Asia and the Caucasus, no. 1, 2000, pp.  123- 132; "Thwarted democratization in Tajikistan," in Conflict, cleavage, and change in Central  Asia and the Caucasus, K. Dawisha and B. Parrott, eds. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), pp. 277-311; "Tajikistan: reform, reaction, and civil war," in New States, New Politics: Building the Post-Soviet Nations, I. Bremmer and R. Taras, eds. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), pp. 602-627; The Subtlest Battle: Islam in Soviet Tajikistan (Foreign Policy Research Institute: The Philadelphia Policy Papers, 1989); Russia and Iran, 1780-1828 (University of Minnesota Press, 1980)

 

Maziar Behrooz was born in 1959 in Tehran, Iran. He received his B.A degree in History-Government from Saint Mary College of California (1982), his M.A. in Modern History of Europe from San Francisco State University (1986), and his Ph.D. from University of California, Los Angeles. Behrooz is Associate Professor in the History Department of San Francisco State University. He has authored numerous articles and book chapters on Iran and is the author of two books on the history of Iranian left movement. His first book is Rebels with a Cause (1999), which has been translated into Persian (2001) and Turkish (2006). His second book is Perspectives on the History of Rebels with a Cause in Iran published in Persian (2006).

 

Hirotake Maeda, graduated from the Faculty of Letters of the University of Tokyo and received his BA in 1995. He received his MA in 1998 and Ph.D. in 2006 from the Graduate School of Humanities and Sociology of the same university. After studying in the Tsereteli Institute of Oriental Studies in Tbilisi for two years, he became a research fellow of the Japan Society for the Promotion of Sciences (2001- 2004). He was then a lecturer at the Slavic Research Centre of Hokkaido University in Sapporo until 2008 and is now appointed assistant professor at the Research Institute for World Languages of Osaka University.

His research focuses on the political lives of Georgian, Armenian and Circassian converts, i.e., gholams in Safavid Persia and succession dynasties. He is furthermore working on topics related to cultural exchanges between the Iranian and Caucasian peoples. His publications include 'Innovation of the Political System under the Safavid Dynasty: The Historical Role of the Gholams' (in Japanese) in Shigaku-Zasshi (1998); 'On the Ethno-Social Background of the Four Gholam Families from Georgia in Safavid Iran' in Studia Iranica (2003); "The Forced Migrations and Reorganisation of the Regional Order in the Caucasus by Safavid Iran: Preconditions and Developments Described by Fazli Khuzani," in Reconstruction and Interaction of Slavic Eurasia and Its Neighboring Worlds, Eds. Ieda Osamu and Uyama Tomohiko, Sapporo: Slavic Research Center, 2006, pp.237-273.

 

Shireen Mahdavi was born in Tehran, Iran and was educated at the London School of Economics and Political Science and the University of Utah and holds a Ph.D. from the University of London. Currently she is an adjunct professor in the Department of History, University of Utah. She has written extensively on various aspects of Iranian history, with special emphasis on the nineteenth century and the position of women. Her last book is: For God, Mammon and Country: A Nineteenth Century Persian Merchant, Westview Press.

 

Vanessa Martin is Professor of Modern Middle Eastern History at Royal Holloway, University of London.  She has written three books, Islam and Modernism: The Iranian Revolution of 1906 (1989), Creating an Islamic State (2000), and The Qajar Pact: Bargaining, Protest and the State in Qajar Iran (2005).  She has also edited two volumes, Women Religion and Culture in Iran (2001), and Anglo- Iranian Relations since 1800 (2005).  She is the Series Editor and Chair of the Publication Committee of the British Institute of Persian Studies, and a co-editor of its journal Iran.  Her main research interest is in Iran during the Qajar period, and especially the Constitutional Revolution, on which she is currently writing a study of urban popular involvement.

 

Afshin Matin-asgari teaches Middle East history at California
State University, Los Angeles. He is the author of  "Iranian Student Opposition
to the Shah" (2002) and about a dozen articles on twentieth-century Iran's
political and intellectual history. Currently, he is working on a book dealing
with Iranian historiography and another on Iranian identity.

 

Emily O'Dell received her Ph.D and two Masters from Brown University.  She is currently a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Humanities Center at Harvard, where she also teaches in the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations and is a Research Fellow for the Islamopedia Initiative of the Islam in the West Programme. She is currently working on Iran-Tajik relations, Islam in Russia and Eastern Europe, Orientalism in mixed media, Cairo's City of the Dead, fatwas in cyberspace, and Sufism in Cairo, Dushanbe, Bamako, Istanbul and Central Asia. Her book manuscript on emotion in ancient Egypt will be published by Gorgias Press next year.

 

Irina Pavlova obtained her Ph.D in nineteenth-twentieth century Iranian history in 1976. Since then she has been a senior researcher in the Institute of Oriental Studies, St Petersburg (formerly Leningrad). She is the author of three books and over sixty articles. The books include: Chronicle of the Safavids: manuscript of Muhammad Masum Xylasat as-siyar (Moscow, 1993); publication of the old Russian manuscript, S. Bronevskiy,  The  New Accounts  of the Caucasus ( Saint-Petersburg, 2004).

 

Prof. Dr. S.Rustamova-Tohidi is a well-known scientist, historian and orientalist of the Azerbaijan Republic. She is author of 6 books, about 50 original articles, upwards of 100 essays. She is scientific editor of 4 books, contributed to the compilation of 4 collected documents. Her works have been published in Azerbaijan, Russia, Iran, Turkey, the Netherlands, England, Austria; in Azeri, Russian, Farsi, Turkish, English. The range of her scientific interests are as follows: political history of Caucasus, Azerbaijan, Iran and Turkey in the first half of the 20 century, history of the press of these countries, history of ideologies, history of the Comintern, history of national-liberation movements, theoretical aspects and history of repressions and deportations.

Her key scientific works are monographs: Émigré press of the Iranian Communist Party. 1917-1932. (Persian language) 1985, pp. 145; Comintern Eastern policy and Iran (1919-1943), Baku, Khazar University Press, 2001, pp.507; March 1918. Baku. Azerbaijani massacres in documents. Baku, Indigo press, 2009, 864 pp. Dr. S.Rustamova-Tohidi has over the past 10 years attended 16 international conferences and workshops. Dr. S.Rustamova-Tohidi maintains close relations with scientific centers of Europe, America, Russia and Central Asia, especially with scientific centers of the Netherlands. Dr. S.Rustamova-Tohidi took part in other international projects. In particular: She contributed to the compilation of material and documents for a book titled 'To See the Dawn, Baku, 1920. First Congress of the Peoples of the East'. Pathfinder, New York-USA, 1993; Scientific project Zerrspiegel-Zerkala. - Institute of Oriental Studies, Martin-Luther-University, Halle, Wittenberg, Germany (zerrspiegel. orientphil.uni-halle.de), 2001-2003. (Theme: An image of the Russian colonizers in perception of the native Moslem population of the Caucasus (1806-1917). As for the last project, Dr. S.Rustamova-Tohidi is a compiler of more than 300 documents; Scientific project: Production and preservation of alternative sources. Small grant program of SEPHIS, IISH, Amsterdam, 2004; within the framework of the latest project, Dr.S.Rustamova-Tohidi has been successful in collecting a unique audio-video material, including personal evidences of survived victims of Stalin repressions, their family members, exiled Iranian migrants. Using the method of the so-called "verbal history" in various countries (Azerbaijan, Iran, Russia, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan), S.Rustamova-Tohidi questioned about 200 respondents and currently proceeds with this work picking out scores of private documents, letters, photographs, diaries, etc. All the materials submitted to the IISH will be used in the Project. Scientific project: Islam in Soviet Azerbaijan, 1920-1941. National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Councils for International Education: ACTR/ACCELS, and the National Council for Eurasian and East European Research. New-York, 2005; (The religions policy of Soviet Azerbaijan.1920-1940. In the Project it is studied as a constituent theme: Religions and cult centers and spiritual life of the Iranian migrants (Shiites) in Soviet Azerbaijan in the 1920-1940s.)

 

Fatema Soudavar Farmanfarmaian born 1940, Tehran, is an independent researcher and writer, a Fellow Trustee of the Soudavar Memorial Foundation, Geneva, Switzerland, a permanent member of the recently founded Society for Hellenic-Iranian Studies and a life member of the Ancient Iran and India Trust. Her published articles and essays in English include: 'James Baillie Fraser in Mashad or The Pilgrimage of a Nineteenth-century Scotsman to the Shrine of the Imam Reza', in BIPS' Iran, 1997; 'Haft Qalam Arayesh: Cosmetics in the Iranian World', in Iranian Studies, 2000  (Persian translation in Hasti); Haft Qalam Arayesh in Iranian Lands: From Prehistory to the Qajar period: (a variation of the the above) in the International Qajar Studies Association Journal, 2003; Persian, Pasionaria and Princess (in memoriam of Mariam Firuz) in IQSA Journal 2008 (due to be translated by Prof. Bert Fragner for publication in German); 2002-6: Internet articles for iranian.com, Payvand and Irandokht (most recently two personal memoirs of the late Mariam Firuz, including the above). She has also published in Persian : several articles on environmental, demographic and social issues, published in the 1970s; To'se'e-ye eghtesadi va masa'el zistmohiti (1973) main introductory essay to a collection of articles chosen and edited by the author; introductory essay to two editions of a posthumous book of novellas, Sabeqiya, by Abdolali Farmanfarmaian (the author's late husband whose full biography is included in the currently banned second edition). Forthcoming publications include: An Iranian Perspective of Fraser's Trip to Mashhad in the 1820s; The Twin Gardens of Rosewater Valley, due to appear in the IQSA Journal of 2009, to be followed in a longer version for a book on Qajar architecture; Georgia and Iran: Three Millennia of Cultural Relations, An Overview (due to be published in the next issue of the Journal of Persianate Studies); a book in Persian on the ancestral history of the Malek family (of Malek Library fame) with reproductions of some of the key documents in transcript or in facsimile version. (A shorter English version is also contemplated).

 

Saeed Reza Talajooy received his BA and MA in English Literature from the University of Tehran. For a number of years he wrote for Iranian theatre journals and taught English literature and drama at Tehran and Allameh Tabatabaee Universities. In 2003 he came to the UK to do his PhD at the University of Leeds. At the moment he is a Post-doctoral Mellon Fellow at University College London. His research is focused on the point of convergence between performance and translation studies with a particular interest in the changing patterns of Iranian identity as reflected in Iranian cultural products. As a teacher, he contributes to the translation and comparative literature courses at SOAS and UCL.

 

John Tchalenko graduated in Geology, took his PhD in Civil Engineering, became a documentary film director in arts and science films and is presently Reader in Drawing and Cognition at the University of the Arts London. During extensive research on earthquake faults in Iran he came across the traces of Alexander Iyas, the Russian Consul in Persia (1901 - 1914), and discovered that Iyas was his great uncle and a remarkable photographer. In 2006, John published "Images from the Endgame: Persia seen through a Russian Lens 1901-1914" (Saqi Books) which accompanied a photographic exhibition at the Brunei Gallery, SOAS, London.

 

Clement Therme is a PhD Candidate at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS) and at the Graduate Institute (Geneva). He has been, since September 2006, Research Fellow for the Middle East Centre of the Institut Français de Relations Internationales (IFRI).

 

Sohrab Yazdani was born in Port Anzali, Iran in 1949. He was educated in Iran and England, where he received his Ph.D. from Keele University. Between 1984 and 1994 he taught history at Sistan and Baluchistan University and since then at the Teacher's Training University, ( Tarbiyat-e Mo'allem), Tehran. His main field of interest is socio-political movements of Twentieth- century Iran. His published books are : Kasravi va Tarikh-e Mashruteh-ye Iran, Sur-e Esrafil: Nameh-ye Azadi, and Mojahedan-e Mashruteh.