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Student Research

Alina Utrata

Highlights of undergraduate and graduate student research funded by the Iranian Studies Program

Student Research

Building on her certificate in Iranian Studies, PhD candidate Alexandria Brown-Hejazi used an Iranian Studies grant to assist her research, creation, and hosting of an exhibit with the David Rumsey Map Center titled "Mapping the Islamic World: The Ottoman, Safavid, and Mughal Empires" in the spring of 2021. 

About the exhibit: 

"The early modern world witnessed…

Archival Research, Student Travel Study

Daniella Farah, a PhD candidate in Jewish history, conducted interviews and archival research in the summer of 2020 for her dissertation on the Jews of twentieth-century Iran, focusing on the themes of education, national belonging, and the press among Iran’s Jews from the mid-1940s to the early 1980s.

Student Research

Cameron, a senior studying math and computer science and minoring in Iranian Studies, explored questions of assimilation, class, immigration, and family history amongst the Iranian diaspora of the Washington metro area in a project titled “The Way to the Bread.” 

Language Study

Saad Lakhani is a second year PhD student in the department of anthropology at Stanford University. He is interested in the politics Islam and nationalism in Pakistan. His PhD project concentrates on the political resurgence of the Barelvi religious movement in Pakistan.

In the summer of 2019, he took Persian language classes to assist in his research on the cultural and political…

Archival Research, Student Travel Study

Alexandria Brown-Hejazi, Ph.D. student in Art History and working on a certificate in Iranian Studies, was awarded a Fulbright scholarship to study artistic and cultural exchanges between Safavid Iran and Italy in Rome in March of 2020. In the summer of 2019, she received funding from the Iranian Studies Program to conduct archival research in Venice. Here, she stands next to a 1603…

Student Travel Study

Feyaad Allie is a PhD student in political science at Stanford. He is interested in international relations and comparative politics particularly the relationship between religion and conflict/violence. Feyaad holds a BA in Government from Dartmouth College. Prior to Stanford, Feyaad worked in international development in Nairobi, Kenya.

In the summer of 2019, Feyaad traveled to…

Language Study

Parsa (class of 2019): "I am studying social and cultural anthropology. This summer, thanks to the generous funding from the Iranian Studies Program, I am attending a second-year Kurdish program at Indiana University. After my language program, I will be conducting field-work among Kurdish-Americans in Nashville, Tennessee for my honors thesis research. My research is concerned with the…

Student Research

Alexandria is a PhD student in the department of Art History. She studies early modern art and architecture, with a particular focus on Renaissance Italy and Safavid Iran. She is especially interested in the design of Italian and Islamic palatial complexes as architectural expressions of power. Her dissertation, “The Art of Diplomacy: Visual Exchange Between Italy and Iran, 1600-1650”…

Archival Research, Student Travel Study

Daniella Farah is a PhD candidate in Jewish History at Stanford University.  She examines the cultural, religious and social facets of Jewish communities in Iran and Turkey in the twentieth century, with a specific focus on how nationalistic campaigns came to affect these communities.  During the summer of 2017, with the help of the Iranian Studies Program, Daniella conducted…

Student Research

Rachel (class of 2018) is from Seattle Washington and is studying International Relations and minoring in Iranian Studies and the Arabic track of the Middle Eastern Language, Literature and Culture minor. She hopes to learn more about the role of religion in democracies in the Middle East. Her favorite experience at Stanford so far has been doing a directed reading with…