NYU-ISI Book Talk: The Color Black: Enslavement and Erasure in Iran
April 13, 2023 | 5PM | In-person (Kevorkian Center Library) or online
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Book Talk: The Color Black: Enslavement and Erasure in Iran
With: Beeta Baghoolizadeh (Princeton University), Nahid Mozaffari (University of Leipzig), and Arang Keshavarzian (New York University) as Moderator
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In this talk, Dr. Baghoolizadeh will explore constructions of race and memory through the lens of slavery and abolition in nineteenth and twentieth century Iran. Drawing on archival, visual, and architectural sources, her research unearths an intentionally hidden history within both institutional spaces and collective memory to examine the sharp contours of racialized enslavement that have since been blurred by those willing to forget.
Beeta Baghoolizadeh is a historian of memory, visuality, and race. Currently, she is an Associate Research Scholar at Princeton University’s Mossavar-Rahmani Center for Iran and Persian Gulf Studies. Her first book, which excavates enslavement and its erasure Iran, is forthcoming with Duke University Press. She also has articles published or forthcoming in Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East, Lateral – Journal of the Cultural Studies Association, and the American Historical Review.
Nahid Mozafarri is a Senior Research Scholar at the Humanities Center for Advanced Studies.She was Associate Professor at the Department of Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies at New York University, and taught at New York University Paris, and at the New School for Social Research. Her publications include “Crafting Constitutionalism: An Iranian Secular Modernist Project” in The Iranian Constitutional Revolution: Proceedings of the Centenary Conference at the University of Oxford (Vanessa Martin and Houchang Chehabi, eds.) 2009, “Civic Piety: “Visions of Secularity in Constitutional Iran” in Lucian Holscher and Marion Eggert, eds, Religion and Secularity (Brill, 2013) Strange Times, My Dear: The PEN Anthology of Contemporary Iranian Literature (Arcade Publishing 2005, 2013), “Culture and Resistance: Writing Back to Power in Targeting Iran, David Barsamian, ed. (City Lights, 2007), She is currently completing an edited volume entitled, Multiple Histories of Slavery in Qajar Iran.
Arang Keshavarzian earned his PhD from the Department of Politics at Princeton University and has been a faculty member in the Department of Middle East & Islamic Studies since 2009. His research and teaching interests include the politics and political economy of the modern Middle East, Iranian history, and transnational approaches to the Persian Gulf. His book, Bazaar and State in Iran, traces the multiple and intersecting transformations in relations within and beyond the Tehran Bazaar under the Pahlavi monarchy and the Islamic Republic. He co-edited Global 1979: Geographies and Histories of the Iranian Revolution with Ali Mirsepassi. Among his publications are journal articles and book chapters on clergy-state relations, smuggling, authoritarian survival, urbanism, geopolitics and geo-economics, and the history of the Persian Gulf.
Accommodation requests related to a disability should be sent to kevorkian.center@nyu.edu by September 22, 2022. A good-faith effort will be made to fulfill requests.
