Mojtaba Mahdavi is Professor of Political Science and the ECMC Chair in Islamic Studies at the University of Alberta. He is the author and editor of numerous works on post-Islamism, contemporary social movements and democratization in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA), postrevolutionary Iran, and modern Islamic political thought. He is the editor of The Myth of ‘Middle East Exceptionalism’: Unfinished Social Movements (Syracuse University Press, 2023), co-editor of Rethinking China, the Middle East and Asia in a “Multiplex World” (Brill 2022) and Towards the Dignity of Difference: Neither ‘End of History’ nor ‘Clash of Civilizations’ (Routledge 2012), and guest editor of The Many Faces of Contemporary Post-Islamism in the journal Religions (2021), as well as of Contemporary Social Movements in the Middle East and Beyond in the journal Sociology of Islam (2014). Dr. Mahdavi is currently working on the following book projects: “Ali Shariati and Beyond: Imagining Ethical Democratic Socialism in Muslim Contexts;” “Towards a Progressive Post-Islamism: Neo-Shariati Discourse in Postrevolutionary Iran;” and “Iran: Is a Post-Islamist Democracy Possible?”
He is a recipient of numerous awards and grants including the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) Connection Grant, and the SSHRC Conference Fund, IDRC Canada Partnership and Killam Research Operating grants, as well as the Visiting Fellow Grant at the Liu Institute and Green College of the University of British Columbia, among others.
Dr. Mahdavi’s research lies at the intersection of critical Middle East Studies, Political Economy, Contemporary Islamic Studies, and Decolonial/Postcolonial Studies. It is primarily driven by his interest in socio-structural changes in the life of ordinary people and discursive/intellectual transformations in MENA/Muslim contexts. He is interested in supervising graduate students working on the critical study of social movements, state-society relations, religion & politics, and the political economy of MENA; alternative modernities and democracies in Muslim majority contexts; critical post-colonial studies; and contemporary Islamic studies.
For a list of selected publications, please visit:
https://apps.ualberta.ca/directory/person/mahdavia
https://www.mojtabamahdavi.com/