Research

Peer reviewed-articles

“Histories of Imperial Mythologies and US Counterterrorism Efforts,” forthcoming in Reviews in American History.

“Keywords as Frameworks for Liberatory Pedagogy and Praxis: Meeting SWANA and Asian American Studies,” forthcoming in Journal of Asian American Studies.

“Persian/American Exceptionalism in the Multicultural Era: Post-9/11 Strategies of Belonging in the Iranian Diaspora Through Cultural Production,” Amerasia 47:3 (2021).

Book chapters

“‘Support the 41’: Iranian Student Activism in Northern California, 1970-3,” in American-Iranian Dialogues: From Constitution to White Revolution, c. 1890s-1960s. 167-182. Edited by Matthew Shannon. New York: Bloomsbury, 2021.

Manuscript-in-progress:
The imperial life of iranian racial formation

How Iranian foreign nationals in the United States give us a look into the imperial dynamics of domestic racial formation.

Iranians in the US have historically been overlooked in their relationship to the US racial hierarchy, though Iran itself has been the subject of many diplomatic histories in relation to the United States. Indeed, this hypervisibility of US-Iran foreign relations has led to the relative invisibility of social and cultural histories of Iranians who have found themselves in the United States since 1953. The Imperial Life of Iranian Racial Formation in the United States (working title) traces the imperial dimensions of domestic racial formation through the history of Iranian foreign nationals in the United States. It does so from two new angles. First, it argues this is necessarily a transnational story, one in which the United States’ imperial reach and neocolonial projects are crucial to understanding domestic dynamics of racial formation. Second, it examines this transnational story from both the top-down and the bottom-up, demonstrating the importance of juxtaposing U.S. state-led projects alongside diverging Iranian diasporic self-constructions in shedding light on their racialization and re-racialization within the United States.

Looking at underutilized and private archives alongside newspapers, U.S. government records, political ephemera, and cultural objects such as photography, the manuscript traces the varied processes of Iranian racial formation in the United States from 1953 to 2001, and how it has long-lasting implications on US foreign and immigration policy. Grounded in the fields of Ethnic Studies and diplomatic history, each chapter of the book examines a distinct process of Iranian racialization by juxtaposing US state-level projects at different scales—international, federal, state, and local—alongside Iranians on the ground who diverge in their own racial self-construction. Ultimately, the project shows how Iranian foreign nationals as transnational subjects of US empire are critical to understanding how imperial motivations and domestic policies link to create racial categories that ebb and flow over time.