Mohamad Tavakoli-Targhi, the Inaugural Director of the Elahé Omidyar Mir-Djalali Institute of Iranian Studies, is Professor of Historical Studies, History, and Near and Middle Eastern Civilizations at the University of Toronto. He was the founding Chair of the Department of Historical Studies at the University of Toronto-Mississauga (2004-07) and has served as President of the International Society for Iranian Studies (2008-10). In addition to serving as Editor-in-Chief of Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East (2001-2012), a Duke University Press journal, he was the Editor of Iran Nameh (2011-2015). He is currently the Editor-in-Chief of Iran Namag, a bilingual quarterly of Iranian Studies, and is the co-editor of the Iranian Studies book series published by Routledge. Tavakoli is the author of Refashioning Iran: Orientalism, Occidentalism and Historiography (Palgrave, 2001) and Tajaddud-i Bumi [Vernacular Modernity] (Nashr-i Tarikh, 2003). Together with providing critical introductions in Persian, he has edited the volumes Civilizational Wisdom: Selected Works of Ehsan Yarshater (Toronto: Iran Namaeh Books, 2015); Jahangir Amuzgar: Selected Economic Essays (Toronto: Iran Nameh Books, 2015); and Ayin-i Danishjuyan: The First University of Tehran Student Journal (Toronto: Iran Nameh Books, 2016). Additionally, he is the Editor-in-Chief of Cinema & Women Poets Iranica: Digital Research Compendia. Tavakoli has published numerous historiographical articles in English and Persian on the topics of Iranian modernity, matriarchal nationalism, biopolitics, rights governmentality, and clerico-engineering. He is currently completing a monograph, Pathologizing Iran, which explores the emergence of modern diagnostic historical narratives and prognostic conceptions of politics. Tavakoli-Targhi is the recipient of two Outstanding Teacher awards from Illinois State University (1996 and 2001) and has held visiting fellowships at St. Antony’s College, Oxford University (1998), the Center for Historical Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University (New Delhi, 1992–93); and Harvard University (1991–92). He holds a BA in Political Science and an MA in History from the University of Iowa, and a Ph.D. in History from the University of Chicago.
Associate Editor
Golbarg Rekabtalaei
Golbarg Rekabtalaei is a historian of Modern Iran, with a broader focus on the Middle East. She is currently an assistant professor in the Department of History at Seton Hall University, where she also serves as the Co-Director of the Middle Eastern Studies Program. She received her PhD in Near and Middle Eastern Civilizations from University of Toronto in 2015. Her research focuses on the cultural history of twentieth century Iran, especially the history of cinema. She is interested in the relationships between cinematic image and space, modernity, cosmopolitanism, urbanisation, nationalism, and revolutions. Her book, Iranian Cosmopolitanism: A Cinematic History, was published in Cambridge University Press’s Global Middle East book series in 2019.
Associate Editor
Khatereh Sheibani
Khatereh Sheibani is a scholar, author and curator of Iranian cinema and Persian literature and culture. She has established multiple courses in Persian studies (language, literature and culture) at York University. Khatereh completed her doctorate degree in Comparative Literature and Film Studies at the University of Alberta, Canada in 2007. Her book entitled The Poetics of Iranian Cinema: Aesthetics, Modernity, and Film after the Revolution was published in November 2011 by I.B.Tauris, UK . She has co-edited a special issue of Iran Namag on Abbas Kiarostami (w/ Mohamad Tavakoli-Targhi, University of Toronto Press, 2018). Khatereh has written articles on modern Persian literature, Iranian cinema and Middle Eastern cinemas in literary and film anthologies and journals such as Iranian Studies and Canadian Journal of Film Studies. She is collaborating with Iran Namag for a special issue on radio to be published in 2021. She has written two novels (in Persian) so far. The first novel titled Hotel Iran will be published in 2021 by Nashr-e Ameh in Tehran. Her second novel, Blue Bird café is going to be published in Europe in 2021. Khatereh was consulted and interviewed on issues regarding Iranian cinema by broadcasting services and journals such as CBC, PRI, and the New York Times. Currently, she is on research leave to work on a book-length project on gender representation in Iranian cinema.
Managing Editor
Shabnam Golkhandan
Shabnam Golkhandan is Manager of the Tavakoli Archives and Managing Editor of the Cinema Iranica and Women Poets projects at the Elahé Omidyar Mir-Djalali Institute of Iranian Studies. Shabnam is also a doctoral candidate at the Department of History of Art at Yale University. Previously, she held research fellowships at the Yale University Art Gallery and before that in the National Museum of Asian Art Archive at the Smithsonian. Her academic history includes an MA in the history of the Modern Middle East and a BA in Art History, both from University of Toronto. Shabnam’s academic interests include, along with the broader subject of the history of the Modern Middle East, the historiography of Islamic art, the intermingling of text and image in the pictorial arts of the Middle East through the centuries, and the relationship between photography, painting, and print in the last half of 19th century in Iran. Her diverse experiences have afforded her a globally aware frame of reference steeped in vernacular modes of inquiry and practice in places such as Cairo, Istanbul, Tbilisi, Tabriz, Tehran, Mashhad, and Bombay.
Cinema Iranica Coordinator
Sophia Farokhi
Sophia Farokhi is Research Coordinator for The Cinema Iranica Project at the Elahé Omidyar Mir-Djalali Institute of Iranian Studies. Sophia most recently held a Postdoctoral Fellowship in the Department of Historical Studies, University of Toronto. She holds a PhD in Iranian Studies. Her dissertation, Contesting Identities: A Critical Analysis of Iranian Identities, examined contemporary Iranian political identities, their roots in Persian history, and their relation to more recent cultural and political phenomena in the Middle East, paying particular attention to the sociopolitical and religious influences shaping the perspective of contemporary Iranian political thinkers. Subsequent to the completion of her dissertation, Sophia worked as a lecturer at several universities in Iran, teaching courses in Iranian studies, political sociology, and political thought.Sophia is the author of numerous articles on Iranian society and politics, including “Cultural Schizophrenia: A Critical Analysis of Iranian Identity in the Thought of Dariush Shayegan,” and has written, edited, and translated several books. She recently co-translated Professor Shafique Virani’ book; The Ismailis in the Middle Ages: A History of Survival, A Search for Salvation (2007) with Amirkabir Publishers, one of the most well-known publishing houses in Iran.
Abolfazl Moshiri
Abolfazl Moshiri is Research Coordinator for The Iranian Women Poets Project at the Elahé Omidyar Mir-Djalali Institute of Iranian Studies. Abolfazl received his PhD from the Department of Near & Middle Eastern Civilizations, University of Toronto, in 2021. His doctoral dissertation, generously supported for four years through the Ontario Gradate Scholarship, investigated the portrayal of Satan (Iblis) in classical Persian mysticism. His broad research areas include classical Perso-Islamic literature, Iranian Sufism, and the intellectual history of the Persianate world from the 10th to the 16th century. Abolfazl has been involved in several research projects including e-Campus Ontario, for which he developed online interactive modules for various courses in Islamic studies and Muslim civilizations to be offered across universities in Ontario. At the University of Toronto, he has also taught undergraduate courses on classical Persian literature and culture. His forthcoming article entitled “The Ishraqi Path: Toward Systematization of Suhrawardi’s Sufism” offers a new approach in better understanding Suhrawardi’s weltanschauung, which puts a greater emphasis on his mystical inclinations instead of his philosophical viewpoints.
Elizabeth Davis
Elizabeth Davis is a Research Affiliate with the Elahé Omidyar Mir-Djalali Institute of Iranian Studies and holds a PhD in Education from the University of Toronto and an MA in Political Science from McGill University. She researches the intersection of culture, politics, and media, focusing on the role of affect and aesthetics in the reproduction of formations of race, gender, and sexuality. She is the co-editor of Affective Politics of Digital Media (Routledge 2021) and has published articles in the fields of visual culture studies; aesthetics and politics; media studies; and affect theory. Her scholarly work can be found in Theory & Event, Emotion, Space and Society, The Senses and Society, and Cultural Studies. Elizabeth has worked in the fields of diversity and inclusion, accessibility accommodation, grant writing, and non-profit administration. She is a Lecturer in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and Education at the University of Toronto.
David R. Anderson
David R. Anderson is a Research Affiliate with the Elahé Omidyar Mir-Djalali Institute of Iranian Studies. David is a PhD candidate in the Faculty of Environmental and Urban Change at York University. His dissertation, Seeing Otherwise: Nature, Blindness, Memoir, examines memoirs written by blind, queer, black, and women authors in order to evidence how non-dominant, marginalized, and ecologically-oriented sensoriums—particularly non-visual senses like hearing, smell, and touch—can promote more just political, social, and environmental collectivities. David is a Lecturer in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at the University of Toronto and has worked for The Intersectionality Research Hub (Concordia University) and the McLuhan Centre for Culture and Technology (University of Toronto). David’s most recent work has been published in Feminist Formations and Disability Studies Quarterly.
Bilal Hashmi
Bilal Hashmi is a Research Affiliate with the Elahé Omidyar Mir-Djalali Institute of Iranian Studies at the University of Toronto. Trained in English and comparative literature (at U of T and New York University, respectively), he is an editor, translator, and educator, who has taught widely in Canada and the United States, most recently as an Assistant Professor, Teaching Stream, in the Department of Language Studies, University of Toronto Mississauga, and as a Lecturer in the Department of Middle Eastern & South Asian Languages & Cultures at the University of Virginia. Bilal is a consulting editor with Iran Namag and is presently at work on book-length translations of twentieth-century Persian poetry and prose. In 2018, he was selected to participate in the inaugural Persian to English translation workshop offered through the British Centre for Literary Translation’s International Literary Translation & Creative Writing Summer School at the University of East Anglia. He serves as the President of the Literary Translators’ Association of Canada/Association des traducteurs et traductrices littéraires du Canada.
Hamoun Hayati
Hamoun Hayati is a web designer with the Elahé Omidyar Mir-Djalali Institute of Iranian Studies at the University of Toronto. He studied electrical engineering at Toronto Metropolitan University. Hamoun is the founder of the Toronto-based web studio, Hexpace, and has over a decade’s worth of experience working on web design and development projects with clients across different sectors. He is deeply passionate about the future of work and education and using technology to solve real-world problems.
