MERIP, BRISMES, SESAMO Iran Event Series

Mohammad Ali Kadivar is an Associate Professor of Sociology and International Studies; he is also currently a Fellow at Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Studies at Harvard University. His work contributes to political and comparative-historical sociology by exploring the causes, dynamics, and consequences of protest movements as well as the interaction between protest movements and democratization. This work grows out of his experience as a participant-observer of the pro-democracy movement in Iran, but his research agenda moves outward from this case to explore these issues on a global scale, using case studies, comparative-historical methods, and statistical analyses.

Kadivar's first book, Popular Politics and the Path to Durable Democracy, has been published in November 2022 with Princeton University Press. His research has also been published in the American Sociological Review, Social Forces,  Comparative Political Studies, European Sociological Review, Comparative Politics, Socius, Mobilization, Empirical Economics, and Sociology of Development. His work has won awards from the Collective Behaviour and Social Movement (CBSM), Comparative Historical Sociology, Global and Transnational Sociology, Sociology of Development, and Peace, War and Social Conflict sections of the American Sociological Association (ASA). He has also published analyses of Iranian politics for public audiences in English and Farsi in outlets such as Foreign Affairs, Washington Post’s Monkey Cage blog, and BBC Persian.

Paniz Musawi Natanzi is an interdisciplinary feminist scholar and author with research interests in labor, migration, knowledge production, visual and literary cultures, global politics and war. Her empirical and theoretical work focuses on Afghanistan and its global political and aesthetic entanglements, with emphasis on Iran, Pakistan and German-speaking Europe. Currently, she is a Research Associate at the University of Bern, Switzerland.

Naghmeh Sohrabi is the Charles (Corky) Goodman professor of Middle East History and the Director for Research at the Crown Center for Middle East Studies at Brandeis University. She is an historian of modern Iran and is currently finishing a book about the revolutionary generation in Iran titled The Intimate Lives of a Revolution: Iran 1979. She has received fellowships from the Andrew W. Mellon foundation, the American Council of Learned Societies, the American Academy in Berlin, and the Rockefeller foundation's Bellagio Center. Her scholarship on the 1979 revolution has been published in History Compass, International Journal for Middle East Studies, Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East, and various edited volumes. Prof. Sohrabi's writings on Iranian politics, history, and culture along with her translations of analyses published inside Iran on current affairs can be found on her substack "These Are the True Things."