Welcoming Inaugural Zahedi Family Fellow to Stanford

Arash Azizi, a PhD candidate in History and Middle Eastern Studies at New York University (NYU), will be the first Zahedi Family Fellow at Stanford University, joining in spring 2022. His dissertation charts the history of Communist internationalism in the Middle East as part of the Global Cold War. Focusing on the ties between the Communist parties of Iran and Iraq, the dissertation looks at their transnational collaboration, their unique stance on Israel/Palestine and their rivalry with the New Left and Islamists. It looks to show how the Cold War was waged in the Middle East, not only by distant superpowers but by local actors such as the communists and their opponents such as the Shah of Iran. 

The Zahedi Family Fellowship is a 12-week residential fellowship with the Hamid and Christina Moghadam Program in Iranian Studies and the Hoover Library and Archives at Stanford focused on the Ardeshir Zahedi Archives. Azizi will conduct research on Iranian foreign policy and the Cold War in the Middle East by utilizing the Zahedi papers and other resources at the Hoover Institution Library and Archives. He is particularly interested in the rich account of Pahlavi Iran’s diplomatic relations with countries such as Turkey, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Israel, the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia which is found in the Zahedi papers and which he previously used for his research project on Iran and the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.

Azizi will give a public lecture on his research at the end of his residency (details to come in spring quarter).