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Events

Social Histories of Iran, Modernism and Marginality in the Middle East

Stephanie Cronin will discuss her new book, Social Histories of Iran: Modernism and Marginality in the Middle East with Maziyar Ghiabi. This book has sought to problematize state-centred narratives of modern Iranian history and to move beyond a narrow national context, demonstrating the explanatory power of global, transnational and comparative approaches to the social history of the Middle East.


Event details

Topics for conversation include “the global 1979”; the “dangerous classes” and their constructed contrast with the new and avowedly modern bourgeois elites of the interwar Middle East; the hungry poor pitted against the deregulation and globalization of the late nineteenth century Iranian economy; rural criminals of every variety, including bandits, smugglers and pirates; the possibility of subaltern agency seen through the puzzle of slavery.

 

Stephanie CRONIN is Elahé Omidyar Mir-Djalali Research Fellow and a member of the Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies, University of Oxford. She has also taught at the University of Cambridge and the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. She is the author of Armies and State-building in the Modern Middle East: Politics, Nationalism and Military Reform (2014); Shahs, Soldiers and Subalterns in Iran: Opposition, Protest and Revolt, 1921-1941 (2010); Tribal Politics in Iran: Rural Conflict and the New State, 1921-1941 (2006); and The Army and the Creation of the Pahlavi State in Iran, 1910-1926 (1997); She is also the editor of a number of collections. She is currently working on a global history of modern Iran.

 

Tea and coffee will be served in the IAIS Common Room at 4.45pm.

Location:

IAIS Building/LT2