Iran in a Transformative Process by Woman, Life, Freedom, Nayereh Tohidi, January 21, 2024
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.