Zahedi Family Fellows

Diba Mirzaei is a researcher at the German Institute for Global and Area Studies (GIGA) and a PhD candidate at the University of Hamburg. Her dissertation, Iran’s Foreign Policy toward Saudi Arabia from 1968–1979: Fragile Autonomy under the Nixon Doctrine (submitted in June 2025), explores how Iran’s policy toward Saudi Arabia intersected with interpretations of the Shah’s autonomy. It examines whether the cooperation envisioned under the Nixon Doctrine materialized in practice and asks whether it was primarily shaped by American policy prescriptions or by the Shah’s own regional ambitions. The central question is the extent to which Iran exercised foreign policy autonomy vis-à-vis Saudi Arabia under the Nixon Doctrine.

Mirzaei’s research interests include Iranian foreign policy and feminist approaches to international relations. She publishes and presents regularly on these topics and recently taught a university-level course on Iranian foreign policy since the 1970s at the University of Hamburg. Prior to her doctoral studies, she worked at the German Federal Foreign Office in the field of humanitarian assistance.

During her fellowship, Mirzaei plans to continue her research on Iran–Saudi relations, drawing in particular on the Zahedi Papers to reconstruct the nuances of Iranian foreign policy decision-making and its regional implications. Her project seeks to determine whether the Shah pursued a concrete strategy for the Persian Gulf, how he positioned himself in relation to other states in the region, which Arab states he considered competitors, how he perceived Saudi Arabia, and whether he regarded it as a threat. She also aims to analyze the evolution of his relationship with the United States over time. With this work, Mirzaei hopes to challenge existing narratives and provide fresh insights into Iran–Saudi relations. In addition, she intends to develop a book proposal based on her PhD thesis.

Ehssan Hanif is a Ph.D. candidate in the History of Architecture and Urban Development at Cornell University. His research, tentatively titled Petro-domesticity and Modernity in Iran (1929–1963), explores the intricate history of oil and architectural modernity within Iranian domestic spaces, mapping their manifestations from Abadan to Tehran. In his work, he examines how the interplay between oil workers’ movements, international interests in Iran’s subsoil resources, and nationalist discourses reshaped housing projects across Iranian cities. Prior to his time at Cornell, he worked as an independent researcher and translator in Iran, translating several seminal texts into Persian, including Architecture and Modernity (H. Heynen), Benjamin for Architects (B. Elliot), The Story of Post-modernism (C. Jenks), and Aesthetic Theory: Essential Texts (M.F. Gage). Ehssan’s latest scholarly contribution, “Cinemas on Fire: Walter Benjamin’s Spielraum and the 1979 Revolution in Iran,” is forthcoming in Middle East Critique.

During his fellowship at Stanford in the spring of 2025, he examined the political economy of oil in the aftermath of the Anglo-Soviet invasion of Iran (1941), tracing its trajectory toward the formation of the 1954 Consortium. Through a critical analysis of workers’ publications, official correspondence, and conflicts among key stakeholders, his research seeks to illuminate the forces that shaped the Consortium’s emergence and its potential impacts on architectural modernity in Iran.

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.

Watch Dr. Banai's lecture: On the Foreign Sources of Political Legitimacy in Late-Pahlavi Iran (1968-1978) 

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"