Jennifer L. Jenkins is Associate Professor of German and European History at the University of Toronto, where she holds a Canada Research Chair in Modern German History. She is the author of Provincial Modernity: Local Culture and Liberal Politics in Fin-de-Siècle Hamburg (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2003) and has held fellowships from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, Harvard University’s Center for European Studies and from the National Endowment for the Humanities.
During the 2013-2014 academic year, she was a Senior Associate Member at St. Antony’s College, Oxford, where she was finishing a book on German-Iranian relations from the Crimean War to Operation Barbarossa (entitled Weltpolitik on the Persian Frontier: Germany and Iran in the Age of Empire). Further projects include Germany Among the Global Empires 1840 to the Present, which she is writing for the Wiley-Blackwell series “A New History of Modern Europe.” In 2014 she was an associate of Zentrum Moderner Orient in Berlin. Future research interests include two projects: “Germany’s Orient, 1905-1979” and “Tehran 1943: Iran, Europe and the Second World War.”

Shabnam Golkhandan is a doctoral candidate at the Department of History of Art at Yale University and the recently appointed manager of Tavakoli Archives. Previously, she held research fellowships at the Yale University Art Gallery and before that in the Freer|Sackler Archive at the Smithsonian. Her academic history also includes an MA in the history of Modern Middle East and a BA in Art History, both from University of Toronto. Golkhandan’s academic interests include, along with the broader subject of the history of Modern Middle East, the historiography of Islamic art, the intermingling of text and image in the pictorial arts of the Middle East through the centuries, and the relationship between photography, painting and print in the last half of 19th century in Iran. Her diverse experiences has afforded her a globally aware frame of reference steeped in vernacular modes of inquiry and practice in places such as Cairo, Istanbul, Tbilisi, Tabriz, Tehran, Mashhad, and Bombay.

Amir Anbari is the digital librarian and archivist for the Tavakoli Archive at the Elahé Omidyar Mir-Djalali Institute of Iranian Studies, University of Toronto. Amir holds a Master’s degree in Library and Information Science. His Master’s thesis, a survey of online Persian special networks and their role in knowledge management, was the first study of its kind. He also has an MBA certification from the University of Tehran, and is Project Management Certified from Centennial College. After finishing his MBA, he taught several courses in Business Administration, Operation Management and Agile Project Management in the College of Engineering at the University of Tehran. He is an instructor at Centennial College’s Business School, where he teaches Digital Marketing and Marketing Project Management. Amir was a radio guest expert for several years in the startup ecosystem of Iran. During his career, he has gained experience working with the National Library and Archives of Iran and the Parliament Library of Iran

Leila Pourtavaf is an Assistant Professor of Global Public History at York University’s Department of History. Her research stands at the intersection of gender, modernity, and Middle East history with a focus on Qajar Iran. Her upcoming book project, The Cosmopolis Harem, looks at the social, cultural and spatial dimensions of the women’s quarter of Nasir al-Din Shah’s court. She is also an independent curator, and has published in a wide range of journals in both academic and cultural realms, including The Journal of Middle East Women's Studies, Iran Namag: Bilingual Quarterly of Iranian Studies, INCITE Journal of Experimental Media, Fuse Magazine and ArtEast. She is the editor of Féminismes Électriques(2013), a bilingual collection of essays which reflect on the history of feminist art and cultural production.