PhD in History (2023)
About
I entered the History Department PhD program in 2017 to study the early modern and modern Middle East. Throughout the program I produced independent research regarding the environmental, social and cultural history of Iran, and published articles in peer-reviewed journals for Middle East and Iranian studies. At the same time, I co-coordinated an Environmental History Interest Group, a Rackham Interdisciplinary Workshop engaged by graduate students and professors.
My dissertation is an integrative environmental history of Pahlavi Iran (1925-79), which explores multiple campaigns in the Iranian environment meant in one way or another to promote nation-building and modernization. Retelling the history of these projects through an environmental prism, I address diverse, yet interrelated processes, such as tensions between Iranians across social hierarchies as well as between Iranians and foreign experts, the reciprocal influence between environmental imaginaries and actions on the ground, and a long list of adverse environmental processes which appeared in the wake of nation-building projects. I try ultimately to explain how the Iranian environment shaped and was shaped by nationalist narratives in the Pahlavi period, and to understand the origins of the country’s severe environmental crisis in the present.
Fields of Study
Early modern and modern Middle East
Environmental history
Development and infrastructure
Disaster studies
Jewish and Israel studies
