آرش عزیزی پژوهشگر مهمان در دانشگاه بوستون و دارای دکترا در رشته تاریخ و مطالعات خاورمیانه از دانشگاه نیویورک است. دو کتاب او به زبان انگلیسی منتشر شده‌اند: «فرمانده در سایه: سلیمانی، آمریکا و آمال جهانی ایران» (۲۰۲۰)، و «ایرانیان چه می‌خواهند: زن، زندگی، آزادی» (۲۰۲۴). مقالات او در مورد سیاست، تاریخ و سینما در نشریات متعددی منتشر شده‌اند از جمله نیویورک تایمز، واشنگتن پست و وال استریت ژورنال.
Kamran Matin is an Associate Professor of International Relations at Sussex University, UK, where he teaches international history, nationalism, and Middle East politics. His current research focuses on the theory of ‘uneven and combined development’, (nation-)state formation, nationalism, and the limits of postcolonial critique. He is the author of Recasting Iranian Modernity: International Relations and Social Change (Routledge, 2013) and numerous articles and op-eds on Kurdish and Iranian politics, and the co-editor of Historical Sociology and World History: Uneven and Combined Development over the Longue Durée (Rowman & Littlefield International, 2016) and the director of Centre for Advanced International Theory (CAIT).
Nayereh Tohidi is a Professor Emerita and former Chair of Gender & Women’s Studies and the Founding Director of the Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies (2011-2021) at California State University, Northridge. She is also a Research Associate in the Program of Iranian Studies at UCLA coordinating its “Bilingual Lecture Series on Iran” since 2003. She received her MA and Ph.D. from the Universities of Tehran and Illinois in Urbana-Champaign in Educational Psychology and Sociology. She is a recipient of several post-doctoral fellowships and research awards, including a National Endowment for Humanities grant, a year of Fulbright lectureship and research at the Academy of Sciences of the Soviet Republic of Azerbaijan; universities of Harvard and Stanford, the Kennan Institute of the Woodrow Wilson Center, and Keddie-Balzan Fellowship at UCLA. Her teaching and research expertise include gender and sustainable development; women’s movements and feminisms; women and Islam; globalization, ethnicity, and democracy in Iran and the post-Soviet Caucasus.
Her extensive publications include editorship or authorship of three books and numerous articles and interviews in peer-reviewed academic and policy-oriented journals. Tohidi has integrated academic excellence with transnational human/women’s rights activism. She represented women NGOs at the UN-sponsored third and fourth World Conferences on Women in Nairobi and Beijing. She has also served as a consultant for the UN agencies (UNICEF and UNDP) on issues concerning children and women’s rights and status in the Caucasus and the Middle East. Since 2015, she has also joined the faculty board of the online Iran Academia of the Institute for Social Sciences in the Hague.
Kazem Alamdari, received his Ph. D. in sociology from the University of Illinois, Champaign-Urban, his MA in Educational Administration from Illinois State University, and his BS from the University of Tehran in Psychology. He has taught at various universities, including UCLA, CSULA, and CSUN. Alamdari has published Ten books and numerous articles in English and Persian, including:
1. Civil Society: Theories, Contexts, and Experiences, 2015;
2. Why the Reform Failed: A Critical Study of the Eight Year Reform Era in Iran: 1997-2005, 2008;
3. Why the Middle East Lagged Behind: The Case of Iran 2004;
4. The Global Crisis: A Critique of the Clash of Civilizations and Dialogue Among Civilizations, 2003; and
5. a best seller that reached to 19th edition Why Iran Lagged Behind and the West Moved Forward, 2000 – 2014.
His latest articles include: “Global Civil-Society Movements: What the World Social Forum Can Do to Change the World’s Situation,” Sociology and Criminology, 2014, 2:2. His article “Religion and Development Revisited: Comparing Islam and Christianity with Reference to the Case of Iran,” in the Journal of Developing Societies, London: Sage, Vol 20 (1-2), has been one of “The 50 Most-Frequently-Read Articles” in five years, reaching number 2 in January 2005. Alamdari was the recipient of a fellowship from the Japan Society for Promotion of Science (JSPS) in Japan, Kyushu University in 1997. As a public intellectual, he is frequently featured in the media and presents lectures at national and international conferences in different parts of the world.
Parastou Forouhar, writer, artist, a human right activist, was born in Tehran, Iran. She studied art at the University of Tehran from 1984 to 1990 and earned her MA from the Aufbaustudium an der Hochschule fur Gestaltung in Offenbach, Germany in 1994. While living in Germany, in 1998 the politically motivated murder of her parents, Dariush Forouhar and Parvaneh Forouhar were carried out in Iran. As a result, the subject matter of her work is largely autobiographical. Themes of her work include gender and identity, particularly the lives and sexuality of women, as well as religious and political issues pertaining to Iran.
Forouhar works across a variety of media, combining an affinity with ornament, pattern, calligraphic form and symmetry with a delicate aesthetic that belies the violence of her subject matter. She has produced many site-specific installation pieces, animations, digital drawings, and photographs as well as works on canvas. She has had a number of solo exhibitions worldwide, particularly in Germany. Though the inspiration behind Forouhar’s subject matter may be tragic, her work has a great emotional range: the results are sometimes macabre, occasionally darkly humorous, and often purely joyful.
In addition to her art works, Parastou Forouhar has authored two books; “ Bekhan be Naam Iran” in Persian and “Sarzaminy ke dar aan Pedar va Madaram be Ghatl Residand – Ebraz Eshgh be Iran” in German.
Monireh Baradaran is a former political prisoner who spent nine years (1981-1990) in Tehran’s prisons. Since 1991 that she settled in Germany as a refugee and has focused her activities on fighting against torture and the death penalty. She has authored several books about the psychology of torture, and evaluation of Truth Commissions. Her 1997 memoir “The simple Truth” has been translated into German, Dutch, Danish and earned her the Medal of Karl von Ossietzky of the International League for Human Rights. Currently she is the editor of the Persian internet-magazine Bidaran (dedicated to the memory of the victims of political persecution in Iran), and collaborates with Amnesty International – Germany, as well as Rastyad Collective in documenting political executions of the 1980s in Iran.
Farzad Seifikaran, is an Iranian-Dutch author and journalist born in September 1987 in Sanandaj. He has studied Persian Literature in Iran and Investigative Journalism in the Netherlands. At present he is an investigative journalist and the director of the human rights section in Radio Zamaneh and has published many investigative reports in the area of politics, social and security issues and human rights.
He has been writing on different subjects for many years as well as collaborating with various publications and media inside and outside of Iran. Since 2017 he has created the Roonak Publishing for the promotion of publishing in exile, countering the censorship and supporting the writers inside and outside of Iran. It has published more than 50 titles in Farsi, Kurdish, English and Dutch.
In 2017 he became an honorary member of the Exiled Writers and Journalists in the Netherlands. He is also a member of the Dutch and European Journalists Union, as well as a member of the International Federation of Journalists.
Elham Hoominfar is an assistant professor in the Global Health Studies Program at Northwestern University. Hoominfar is a sociologist whose research expertise focuses on intersections of environment and society and understanding of social inequalities and social movements with an interdisciplinary approach. She received her first master’s degree in the sociology of development at the University of Tehran, where she also got her bachelor’s degree in sociology. Before she left Iran, she maintained an active research agenda and she was involved in various research and teaching projects in different institutes. She received her second master’s in Cross-Cultural and International Education program at Bowling Green State University, Ohio, and her PhD in sociology from Utah State University. Her PhD project focused on marketization of water and environmental movements in Iran and the US.
Hoominfar has extensive teaching experience in the United States and Iran. She employs a student-centered learning method and a critical view for teaching. She is currently researching environmental justice, water governance, commodification of nature and social resistances with an emphasis on political economy in the Global South and North. She has focused on marginalized groups, and examined issues such as development, natural disasters and social inequality in an array of research publications in both Persian and English.
Younes Jalali has lived in China, Japan and Vietnam and was formerly Assistant Prof. at Stanford Univ.
Pouya Alimagham is a historian of the modern Middle East. He specializes on Iran, Iraq, and the Levant, focusing on such themes as revolutionary and guerrilla movements, imperialism, representation and Orientalism, “Political Islam” and post-Islamism, and the intersections therein.
His dissertation, titled: “Contesting the Iranian Revolution: The Green Uprising,” was the 2016 winner of the Association for Iranian Studies’ Mehrdad Mashayekhi Dissertation Award, which is presented biannually. In the study, he argued that the Green Uprising in 2009 was a culmination of a decades-long history that constituted a post-Islamist paradigm shift in Iran. He harnessed wider regional history as well as Iran’s own revolutionary past in order to underscore his thesis. The manuscript was published in expanded form with Cambridge University Press in 2020. His other articles and book chapters (some in progress) cover the Arab Spring, Iranian protest music, women in Middle East revolutions, sectarianism, and the psycho-history of post-9/11 discourse.
Nasser Mohajer is an independent scholar of modern Iranian history. He has authored many books and written numerous articles on contemporary Iran, including on the prison systems of both the Pahlavi dynasty and the Islamic Republic, women’s movements for equal rights and histories of the Iranian left. He currently resides in Paris and works with Noghteh Resources on Iran.
Nahid Kalbasi, Assistant Professor of economics at Fort Hays State University, is an experienced economist with PhD in economics from George Mason University and specialization in international finance and monetary policy. She has several years of research experience in econometric modelling, macroeconomics, international finance, and risk analysis in think tanks and academia.
She has published several articles across different disciplines in peer reviewed journals on Macroeconomics, International Economics, Econometric Modelling, Corporate Finance, Risk Management, and country risk.
Mahmood Monshipouri, Ph.D., is Chair and Professor of International Relations at San Francisco State University. He is also a lecturer at Global Studies/International and Area Studies at UC-Berkeley, where he teaches Middle East Politics. He is author, most recently, of “Middle East Politics: Changing Dynamics” (New York: Routledge, 2019). Additionally, he is the author and editor of ten more books, including “Information Politics, Protests, and Human Rights in a Digital Age” (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2016) and “Inside the Islamic Republic: Social Change in Post-Khomeini Iran” (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016).
Farhad Moradi is an essayist who lives in Berkeley. His essays cover a variety of genre, including cinema and literature. Nevertheless, all his writings have a political and social approach. Apart from the reports and essays he published on his website, in recent years, he has been written, at the International page and Thoughts of the Shargh Daily, as well as the social section of Radio Zamaneh.
Mohammad Ja’fari was the managing editor and the director on the daily newspaper “Engelab Eslami”, established by Mr. Bani Sadr, in June 1979, a few months before Bani Sadr became the first Iranian president. Mr. Ja’fari was active in the paper from the beginning until his arrest in June 1981.
He was born in 1944 in the village of Marbin in the county of Ardestan, Isfahan Province. After graduating from high school and spending two years in the Literacy Corps (Sepah Danesh), he became a government teacher and taught for two years in the northern part of Tehran (Oshan -Fasham). He left Iran in 1969 for Germany where he earned a Master’s Degree in Chemistry.
While outside the country he joined the Union of Islamic Student Associations and became close to Mr. Bani Sadr. He returned to Iran right after Ayatollah Khomeini, a few days before the revolution.
Ali Kiafar holds a Master’s degree in architecture from the National University of Iran and a Ph.D. in urban and regional planning from the University of Southern California. He has more than four decades of experience in professional practice and university teaching in architecture, urban development/ redevelopment, educational facilities planning and design, educational master planning, and program management.
Banafsheh Keynoush is a foreign affairs scholar and the author of “Saudi Arabia and Iran: Friends or Foes?” She received her PhD at Tufts University. She was recently a Visiting Scholar at Princeton University, and a Visiting Fellow at the King Faisal Center for Islamic Studies and Research in Saudi Arabia. She is an adjunct professor, and a geopolitical consultant, and writes and speaks extensively on the Middle East.
Iraj Mesdaghi began his political life in the United States with the Confederation of Iranian Students and returned to Iran during the 1979 revolution. In 1981, he was arrested because of his activities with the People’s Mojahedeen of Iran and spent the next decade in prison. He fled to Sweden in 1994 where he resumed his political activities. Mesdaghi has written various books and articles on 1988 mass executions of political prisoners in Iran, including the 4 volume book “Neither life Nor Death” about his 10 year experience in prisons, and ”Hell On Earth” investigating the ideological roots of torture in the Islamic Republic. He is currently an independent activist and researcher working on human rights, workers’ rights and prison issues.
ایرج قهرمانلو از یک خانواده کورد کرمانجی در یکی از روستا‌های پیرامون کوچان (قوچان) دیده به جهان گشود . وی دوره دبیرستان را در کوچان گذرانید و در سال ۱۳۵۱ دوره دکترای پزشکی خود را در دانشگاه مشهد به پایان رساند. در دوران دانشجوئی به عضویت سازمان مجاهدین خلق در آمد. دکتر قهرمانلو پس از ۳ سال کار سازمانی بویژه تماس با رهبری، جهت گیری سازمان را درست نمی انگاشت. پس از گذرانیدن دورانهای دشوار درون سازمانی، سر انجام با نا امیدی و سر خوردگی بسیار در فروردین ۱۳۵۱ از سازمان جدا شد. چند ماه بعد، رابطه سازمانی او بر ساواک آشکار گردید و در آذر ۱۳۵۱ دستگیر شد.
و پس از شکنجه بسیار به یک سال زندان محکوم شد. اندکی پس از آزادی، در ۲۸ مرداد ۱۳۵۲ ساواک اطلاعات تازه‌ا‌ی در باره گستردگی ارتباطات وی با مجاهدین بدست آورد و او را دوباره دستگیر کرد. ساواک این بار او را به خاطر پنهان نگاه داشتن اطلاعات در بار نخست به گونه انتقامی شکنجه داد و برای درازمدت زندانی کرد. در خیزش انقلابی سال ۱۳۵۷ بیاری مردم از زندان آزاد شد و سپس با افراد و گروهای سیاسی بدون وابسته شدن به فعالیت سیاسی ادامه داد. دکتر قهرمانلو در همین دوران نیز تخصص پزشکی کودکان را از دانشگاه تهران بدست آورد. شوربختانه اما، با تیره شدن اوضاع سیاسی ایران و دستگیری دوستان و حتی خانواده‌های بیمارانش ناچار شد پیش از آنکه پلیس سیاسی جمهوری ایران به سراغش بیاید، در سال ۱۳۶۳ با خانواده از ایران خارج شود.
Judith Butler is Maxine Elliot Professor in the Department of Comparative Literature and the Program of Critical Theory at the University of California, Berkeley. She received her Ph.D. in Philosophy from Yale University in 1984.
She is the author of several books: Subjects of Desire: Hegelian Reflections in Twentieth-Century France (1987), Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (1990), Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex” (1993), The Psychic Life of Power: Theories of Subjection (1997), Excitable Speech (1997), Antigone’s Claim: Kinship Between Life and Death (2000), Precarious Life: Powers of Violence and Mourning (2004); Undoing Gender (2004), Who Sings the Nation-State?: Language, Politics, Belonging (with Gayatri Spivak in 2008), Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable? (2009), and Is Critique Secular? (co-written with Talal Asad, Wendy Brown, and Saba Mahmood, 2009) and Sois Mon Corps (2011), co-authored with Catherine Malabou. Her most recent books include: Parting Ways: Jewishness and the Critique of Zionism (2012), Dispossession: The Performative in the Political (co-authored with Athena Athanasiou 2013), Senses of the Subject and Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly (2015). And in 2016, she published a co-edited volume, Vulnerability in Resistance, with Duke University Press. Her books have been translated into more than twenty languages.
Elica Vafaie is an Iranian American attorney at the Asian Law Caucus where her work focuses on the immigrant rights and national security. Over the last two months, she has been working on cases involving Iranian Americans at SFO. Prior to Asian Law Caucus, Elica worked as the supervising attorney to establish the University of California Undocumented Legal Services Center providing free immigration legal services to students and their families across California. Elica received her B.A. from UC Irvine and her J.D from UC Davis School of Law, where she was active in the Immigration Law Clinica and was a UC
Human Rights Fellow at the Center for Constitutional Rights.
Fazel Gheybi was born 1954 into a Bahai family with Zoroastrian background in Tehran. In his early years he learned the Bahai-writings from Farhang Holakouee. He finished his studies with emphasis on computer engineering in 1983 in Germany. Meanwhile he showed interest in Marxism and sympathized with the “Tudeh-Party”, which he was turned away from in 1984. Fazel Gheybi works at the Technical University of Darmstadt, at the Institute of Experimental Nuclear Physics. After attending Philosophy courses in Frankfurt for 2 years, he continued the self-study of Philosophy and History. His work “Modern Philosophy and Iran” was published in 2011.
Fereshteh Ghazi is an Iranian journalist. She has worked in more than 18 newspapers in Iran which all have been banned: Khordad, Hammihan, Hambastegi, Bonyan, Etemad. She was arrested in 2004 and was deprived to work until 2007 that she left Iran. Ever since, she has worked in Roozonline website, publishing more than a thousand reports and interviews, mostly concentrated on cases of human rights, especially those who were killed in post-election events, political prisoners and executions.
After receiving his Ph.D. in sociology from the University of Pennsylvania in 1985, Ali Ferdowsi studied as a post-doctoral fellow in the Graduate Program in Demography at the University of California, Berkeley. He taught for three years as a visiting professor in the Department of Middle Eastern Studies at Tokyo University for Foreign Studies in Japan.
After working for five years as an International Specialist for NHK (Japan Broadcast Corporation), he returned to the United States in 1997 and began teaching in the Department of History and Political Science at Notre Dame de Namur University.
Dr. Abbas Milani is the director of Iranian Studies at Stanford University. He is the author of The Shah, Eminent Persians: The Men and Women Who Made Modern Iran, 1941-1979, The Persian Sphinx: Amir Abbas Hoveyda and the Riddle of the Iranian Revolution, Lost Wisdom: Rethinking Modernity in Iran, Encounters with Modernity, On Democracy and Socialism, and Tales of two Cities: a Persian Memoir.
Dr Ahmed Shaheed is a Visiting Lecturer at the University of Essex in Colchester, England and at the City University of New York in the United States. He served as Foreign Minister of the Republic of Maldives from 2005 to 2007 and from 2008 to 2010, during which he led the country’s efforts to sign and ratify all nine international human rights Conventions; to implement them in law and practice; and to improving the country’s compliance with its UN Treaty Body reporting obligations. Dr Shaheed also opened the Permanent Mission of the Maldives in Geneva in 2006 to engage with the United Nations Human Rights Council; established a non-governmental human rights organisation in the Maldives to contributed to civil society’s work to advance respect for human rights in the country; and later worked as a member of the Presidential Commission to Investigate Corruption and as a foreign policy advisor to the President of the Maldives. On 17 June 2011, the President of the UN Human Rights Council appointed Dr Shaheed, as the Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Islamic Republic of Iran. Mr Shaheed commenced his duties officially on 1 August 2011. He has since submitted four reports to the United General Assembly and the Human Rights Council on the human rights situation in the country.
Dr. Mohammad Reza Nikfar is a writer and researcher in the field of political philosophy. He has authored many articles and his books in Farsi and German include: “Violence, Human Rights and Civil Society”, “Critique of Political Theology”, “At the Dead-End of Time, Introduction to the Philosophy of Heidegger”, “The Concept of Peace” and “Faith & Technique” among others. Dr. Nikfar is currently the editor-in-chief of “Radio Zamaneh”.
کاظم کردوانی، جامعه شناس ( از « مدرسه مطالعات عالی علوم اجتماعی – پاریس » ) و پژوهشگر و دارای نشان نخل های آکادمیک وزارت آموزش ملی و تحقیقات و فناوری فرانسه، استاد سابق دانشگاه، عضو و دبیر سابق کانون نویسندگان ایران، دبیر سابق کنفدراسیون جهانی دانشجویان ایرانی، عضو مؤسس و دبیر « شورای بازنگری در شیوه ی نگارش خط فارسی »، عضو مؤسس « کمیته دفاع از حقوق قربانیان قتل های زنجیره ای »؛ علاوه بر شرکت مستمر در فعالیت های فرهنگی و اجتماعی ایرا ن و افزون بر همکاری با نشریه های مستقل ایران ( جامعه سالم، آدینه و … )، در حوزه های زبان و ادبیات و مسایل اجتماعی و سیاسی ایران به کارهای پژوهشی پرداخته است .
In the past three years, the Middle East and North Africa have witnessed the most expansive geopolitical transformation of the past 75 years.
With the rise of political Islam as an alternative to secular authoritarian regimes the prospect for transition to democratic governments that are respectful of human rights is not at all trivial. It may be the time for the region that gave birth to the oldest human civilizations to set an example, rather than to follow one. This talk will explore the idea of bottom up community-centric participatory democracies that foster individual and communal creativity, growth and prosperity while preserving national unity.
Shahla Shafiq left Iran as an exile in 1982 and has lived in Paris since then. As a sociologist, she focuses on the subject of immigrants in France. She has published two books in French on the subject of Muslim Women and has many articles on inter-cultural issues. She has also published many short stories. Her discussion on June 25 will be based on her latest book “Islamic Totalitarianism, Imagination or Reality” translated from French to Persian in 2006.
Psychological Foundation of Democracy, Dr. Nehzat Farnoody, Oct 16, 2011
Imprisoned in Iran: American Hikers Search for Freedom, Sarah Shourd, Jun 19, 2011
Dr. Touraj Atabaki holds the endowed chair of ‘Social History of the Middle East and Central Asia’ at the School of the Middle Eastern Studies of the Leiden University and works as the Senior Research Fellow at the International Institute of Social History in charge of the Department of the Middle East and Central Asia . He studied theoretical physics (BSc,MSc) and history at the National University of Iran and the University of London and received his MA and PhD at Utrecht University .
Dr. Atabaki is the author of Iran in the 20th Century. Historiography and Political Culture (2009); The State and the Subaltern. Society and Politics in Turkey and Iran (2007); Iran and the First World War: A Battleground of the Great Powers (2006); Men of Order: Authoritarian Modernisation Under Atatürk and Reza Shah (2004), among others.
Ramezan Hajimashhadi is the attorney for many prominent Iranian journalists, political activists and students. He was a media and publishing attorney for Ahmad Shamlou from 1995 – 2000.
Dr. Ali Ferdowsi, Professor and Chair of History & Political Science at Notre Dame de Namur University
“Berkeley Lecture Series” in partnership with “Iranian Student Alliance in America – ISAA” Present: · Rebecca Griffin, Political Director for Peace Action West Topic: “Grassroots Diplomacy: My Trip to Iran and What We Can Do to Promote Peace” Date: Sunday, August 2, 2009 Time: 4:00 P.M. Place: 110 Barrows Hall…