Zahedi Family Fellows

Hussein Banai is an Associate Professor of International Studies in the Hamilton Lugar School of Global and International Studies at Indiana University, Bloomington, where he is also faculty affiliate in the departments of Political Science, Middle Eastern Languages and Cultures, and Central Eurasian Studies. He is also a Research Affiliate at the Center for International Studies at MIT. Banai's research interests lie at the intersection of political thought and international relations, with a special focus on topics in democratic theory, non-Western liberal thought, diplomatic history and theory, US-Iran relations, and Iran’s political development. He has published on these topics in academic, policy, and popular periodicals.

He is the author of Hidden Liberalism: Burdened Visions of Progress in Modern Iran (Cambridge University Press, 2020); co-author of two volumes on US-Iran relations: Republics of Myth: National Narratives and the US-Iran Conflict (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2022) and Becoming Enemies: U.S.-Iran Relations and the Iran-Iraq War, 1979–1988 (Rowman & Littlefield, 2012); and co-editor of Human Rights at the Intersections: Transformation through Local, Global, and Cosmopolitan Challenges (Bloomsbury Publishing, 2023). Additionally, he is the Co-Editor of International Studies Review, the flagship review journal of the International Studies Association. From 2018 to 2020, he served as an Associate Editor (for Social Sciences) of Iranian Studies, the journal of the Association for Iranian Studies.

During his fellowship at Stanford, Banai will utilize the Zahedi archives to trace and ascertain the impact of foreign policy decisions on considerations of political legitimacy during the Pahlavi period. This work is part of a larger research on the shifting sources of political legitimacy informing decision-making and agenda-setting in Pahlavi Iran.

Bita Mousavi is a PhD candidate in History and Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies at New York University. Her dissertation, "The Parasitic State: Nature, Wealth, and the Iranian Nation, 1960-1990" is a history of dissent in Iran. In it, she argues that the contradictions and ambivalent promises of oil and developmental nationalism set the terms for conceiving of and critiquing the Iranian state. Both the Pahlavi state and the Islamic Republic of Iran pursued economic development with zeal, casting the construction of hydroelectric dams, agrobusinesses, and the redistribution of lands as a matter of sovereign rights to the nation’s natural body. In the process, oil took on the resonances of wealth, ease and power, fusing political power to nature and fostering a collective language for thinking about and critiquing the Iranian state in its relationship to the nation, nature, and wealth.  

As a Zahedi Fellow, Bita researched Ardeshir Zahedi’s correspondences with other heads of oil-exporting countries. She sought to understand how oil elites used a language of sovereign rights and developmental nationalism to justify price hikes and development projects. She also examined holdings at the Hoover Institution Library and Archives related to opposition groups, paying particular attention to how they juxtaposed oil abundance against economic crisis to critique the state. 

Watch Bita's lecture: "No Cadillac Country: Oil, Sovereignty, and Development in Pahlavi Iran"

Tomoyo Chisaka joins the Iranian Studies Program as the second Zahedi Family Fellow in spring of 2023. Dr. Chisaka is a JSPS postdoctoral fellow at the University of Tokyo, Japan. She is currently a visiting scholar at the Abbasi Program in Islamic Studies at Stanford University, during the 2022-2023 academic year. Her dissertation examined the parliamentary election management in post-revolutionary Iran. Focusing on the legal functions of the Ministry of Interior and the Guardian Council, the dissertation considered when and how Iran’s Supreme Leader delegates autonomy to the executive headed by the President as related to the management of parliamentary elections.

As a Zahedi Fellow, Dr. Chisaka will conduct research on Iranian foreign relations with the US after the 1953 coup by utilizing the Zahedi papers, US National Security Archive, and other resources at the Hoover Institution Library and Archives. She is interested in the US diplomatic approach toward Iran’s domestic politics through the process of forming an authoritarian parliamentary system under the Shah as well as its causes and consequences. 

Watch Tomoyo's lecture: "Parliamentary Politics and Iran-US Relations During the Cold War"

Arash Azizi was the first Zahedi Family Fellow, joining in spring of 2022. As a PhD candidate in History and Middle Eastern Studies at New York University (NYU), 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. 

As a Zahedi Fellow, Azizi conducted 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 was 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. He gave a talk titled "Nobody's Periphery: Pahlavi Iran and the Arab-Israeli Conflict" at the end of his fellowship residency.

Watch Arash's lecture: "Nobody's Periphery: Pahlavi Iran and the Arab-Israeli Conflict"