Mohammad Tavakoli-Targhi
Mohamad Tavakoli-Targhi, the Inaugural Director of the Elahé Omidyar Mir-Djalali Institute of Iranian Studies, is Professor of Historical Studies, History, and Near and Middle Eastern Civilizations at the University of Toronto. From 2004 to 2007, he served as Chair of Historical Studies at the University of Toronto-Mississauga and as President of the International Society for Iranian Studies. As the Editor-in-Chief of Iran Namag, a bilingual quarterly of Iranian Studies, he is also co-editor of the Routledge book series of Iranian Studies. Additionally, he is the Editor-in-Chief of Cinema & Women Poets Iranica: Digital Research Compendia. Tavakoli has published numerous historiographical articles in English and Persian on the topics of Iranian modernity, matriarchal nationalism, biopolitics, rights governmentality, etc. He is currently completing a monograph, Pathologizing Iran, which explores the emergence of modern diagnostic historical narratives and prognostic conceptions of politics.
Shabnam Golkhandan
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
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
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.
Sophia Farokhi
Sophia Farokhi is a Research Associate at the Elahé Omidyar Mir-Djalali Institute of Iranian Studies at the University of Toronto. Sophia holds a PhD in Iranian Studies. Her doctoral thesis, “Contesting Identities: A Critical Analysis of Iranian Identities,” examines contemporary Iranian political identities, their roots in Persian history, and their relation to more recent cultural and political phenomena in the Middle East. Subsequent to the completion of her dissertation, she worked as a lecturer at several universities in Iran, where she taught courses in Iranian studies, political sociology, and political thought. She held a Postdoctoral Fellowship in the Department of Historical Studies (University of Toronto). Sophia has written numerous articles on Iranian society and politics.
Bilal Hashmi
Bilal Hashmi is a Research Affiliate with the the Elahé Omidyar Mir-Djalali Institute of Iranian Studies at the University of Toronto. Trained in English and comparative literature, he is an editor, translator, and educator, who has taught widely in Canada and the United States, most recently as an Assistant Professor, Teaching Stream, in the Department of Language Studies, University of Toronto Mississauga, and as a Lecturer in the Department of Middle Eastern & South Asian Languages & Cultures at the University of Virginia. Bilal is a consulting editor with Iran Namag and is presently at work on book-length translations of twentieth-century Persian poetry and prose. He serves as the President of the Literary Translators’ Association of Canada/Association des traducteurs et traductrices littéraires du Canada.
Guita Banan
Guita Banan is a Research Assistant for the Women Poets project at the Elahé Omidyar Mir-Djalali Institute of Iranian Studies, University of Toronto. She is a graduate student at U of T’s Women and Gender Studies Institute, completing her Master’s with a focus on feminist and decolonial technoscience. She received her PhD in physics from the University of Florida. Her area of focus in her PhD was biophysics of the brain and neuroimaging and this shapes her current interests as she pursues her studies in science and technology studies.
Hamoun Hayati
Hamoun Hayati is a web designer with the Elahé Omidyar Mir-Djalali Institute of Iranian Studies at the University of Toronto. He studied electrical engineering at Toronto Metropolitan University. Hamoun is the founder of the Toronto-based web studio, Hexpace, and has over a decade’s worth of experience working on web design and development projects with clients across different sectors. He is deeply passionate about the future of work and education and using technology to solve real-world problems.
Natasha Shokri
Natasha Shokri is a PhD student in Social Justice Education at OISE, University of Toronto. She holds an MA in Peace and Conflict Studies from the United Nations-mandated University for Peace. Her Master’s dissertation scrutinizes water as a catalyst for peacemaking in the Middle East. Natasha has been nominated for, and has received, various awards and distinctions, including that of UNESCO Youth Peace Ambassador for her peacebuilding and human rights activities. She is author of multiple articles on peace and conflict.
Negar Banisafar
Negar Banisafar is a first-year MA student in Near & Middle Eastern Civilisations at the University of Toronto, under Professor Tavakoli-Targhi’s supervision. Currently, she works as a research assistant for the Iranian Cinema project and the phenomenal Tavakoli Archive, both at the Elahé Omidyar Mir-Djalali Institute of Iranian Studies. She was one of the recipients of the Scholars-at-Risk Fellowship from the School of Graduate Studies and Massey College at U of T. She studied English Language and Literature at Allameh Tabataba’i University for her BA, and she also has an MA in Dramatic Literature from Soore Art University in Iran. For her MA thesis in Dramatic Literature, she focused on the textual analysis of Lacanian desire in a selection of Iranian plays written during the 1960s.
Gunha
Gunha studies the gendered notions of death in twentieth-century Iran by engaging with themes such as martyrdom, suicide, necropolitics, and masculinity. Through this study, he intends to construct the study of the “modernity of death” by incorporating previously disparate pathological studies of suicide and religiopolitical studies of martyrdom. His B.A. thesis, “On Imperfect Rationality in Diplomacy: Evaluation of Iran’s negotiation tactics during 2013-2015 Eu3+3 nuclear negotiation,” won the best paper award in his International Relations major, and his article “Blood, History, and Soil: Strategy of Iranian Jewish Diaspora in the United States,” won 2nd place in 3rd Middle Eastern Studies Student Paper Contest held by Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Republic of Korea. He was given multiple scholarships.