In this episode, Belle interviews Arang Keshavarzian, Associate Professor in Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies at New York University, about his recent book, Making Space for the Gulf: Histories of Regionalism and the Middle East (Stanford University Press, 2024). In Making Space for the Gulf (and in our podcast episode), Keshavarzian offers a relational understanding of the Persian Gulf that foregrounds the entangled histories of its shores, as well as the body of water itself.

In this episode, Belle interviews Niloofar Haeri, Anthropology Professor at Johns Hopkins University, about her recent book, Say What Your Longing Heart Desires: Women, Prayer, and Poetry in Iran (Stanford University Press, 2021). 

In Say What Your Longing Heart Desires (and in our podcast episode), Haeri illustrates how poetry shaped and transformed the religious lives and practices of a group of women in contemporary Iran. The ethnography traces how the historic and culturally-ingrained practice of poetry reading and recitation of mystic poetry in particular, intertwined with prayer, helped these women situate their relationship to the divine. 

In this episode, Belle interviews Dr. Beeta Baghoolizadeh, Associate Research Scholar at Princeton University, about her recent book, The Color Black: Enslavement and Erasure in Iran (Duke University Press, 2024). They discuss the history of enslavement in Iran, and the erasures surrounding those histories of enslavement following abolition in Iran in 1929, particularly of enslaved Black people, in the archives and in collective memory. 

In this episode, Belle interviews Dr. Pouya Alimagham, a Lecturer at MIT, and a Faculty Affiliate at the Harvard Kennedy School’s Middle East Initiative, about his recent book, Contesting the Iranian Revolution: The Green Uprisings (Cambridge University Press, 2020). This June marks 15 years since millions of Iranians took to the street in protest after Mahmoud Ahmedinejad was announced as the winner of the 2009 presidential elections. Now known as the 2009 Green Movement, the mass protests spread under the slogan “Where is my vote?” amid widespread suspicions that the election had been rigged. In Contesting the Iranian Revolution: The Green Uprisings (and our podcast episode), Alimagham addresses the continuities and shifts between the 1979 Iranian Revolution and the 2009 Green Movement.

In this episode, Belle interviews Golnar Nikpour, Assistant Professor of History at Dartmouth College, about her recent book, The Incarcerated Modern: Prisons and Public Life in Iran (Stanford University Press, 2024). In The Incarcerated Modern (and our podcast episode), Nikpour addresses the history of imprisonment and incarceration in Iran, and how it is intertwined with threads of carceral infrastructures traversing the globe from the late nineteenth century to today. We also discuss global solidarity movements in honor of May Day. 

In this episode, Belle interviews Seema Golestaneh, Associate Professor in Near Eastern Studies at Cornell University, about her recent book, Unknowing and the Everyday: Sufism and Knowledge in Iran (Duke University Press, 2023). 

In this episode, Belle interviews Samuel Hodgkin, Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature at Yale University, about his recent book, Persianate Verse and the Poetics of Eastern Internationalism (Cambridge University Press, 2023).

In this episode, Dr. Belle Cheves interviews Pamela Karimi, Professor of Art Education, Art History & Media Studies at UMass Dartmouth, about her book, Alternative Iran: Contemporary Art and Critical Spatial Practice (Stanford University Press, 2022).