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Touraj Atabaki is Research Fellow at the International Institute of Social History and Emeritus Professor of Social History of the Middle East and Central Asia at Leiden University.
He studied first theoretical physics and then history in Birckbeck College, University of London and then had his PhD in 1991 from University of Utrecht. Atabaki worked at Utrecht University, University of Amsterdam and Leiden University where he held the Chair of Social History of the Middle East and Central Asia. Atabaki’s earlier research interest encompassed historiography, ethnic studies and the practice of authoritarianism in Iran, the Ottoman/Turkey and everyday Stalinism in the Soviet Central Asia and the Caucasus. However, in the last ten years his research interest has focused more on the labour history and the history of work and has coordinated a project on the hundred years’ social history of labour in the Iranian oil industry, funded by the Netherlands Organisation for scientific Research. Touraj Atabaki has written extensively on the nineteenth- twentieth century history of Iran, Turkey, the Caucasus and Central Asia.
Atabaki has published twenty books and numerous articles and book chapters. His latest books are:
– Social History of the Iranian oil Industry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, forthcoming).
– Victims of Their Faith. The Lives and Fates of Iranian Political Activists and Migrant Workers in the Interwar Soviet Union. Co-author Lana Ravandi Fadaii (Moscow: Russian Academy of Sciences, 2020) Second Edition.
– Working for Oil. Co-editors Elisabetta Bini, Kaveh Ehsani (London: Palgarve Macmillan, 2018)