Saghar Sadeghian

Saghar Sadeghian is a Postdoctoral Associate and Lecturer in Middle East Studies in Whitney and Betty MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies at Yale. She received the Rice Faculty Fellowship for the 2015-16 academic year. Her primary research focuses on modern citizenship in the Middle East with emphasis on Iran, Iraq and Afghanistan. She is interested in minority groups and the question of gender, race, religion and ethnicity. For her PhD Thesis, “Non-Muslim Communities in Iran during the Constitutional Revolution,” she examined the concept of citizenship vis-à-vis the religious identity of Zoroastrians, Jews, Christians and Baha’is in local, national and international levels. As some ongoing projects, Saghar is working on her thesis for a book publication; and proceeds a new project on Environmental History of Forestry and Exploitation of Caspian Forests of Northern Iran in the 19th and 20th Centuries.  She is also helping the Middle East Studies Council’s Iranian Studies Program to develop the Iran History Internet Archive website.

For this academic year, Saghar is teaching two courses: ‘Citizenship in the Modern Middle East: race, religion and ethnicity’, and ‘Gender Trouble in the Middle East: a historical approach’