Mahdi Ganjavi, PhD (University of Toronto), is a lecturer, scholar, writer and publisher and a distinguished historian of education, print, and literature in the Middle East. A former postdoctoral fellow at the School of Education and Social Policy at Northwestern University, he currently teaches at the Faculty of Information at the University of Toronto. His research focuses on intellectual freedom, the transnational history of literature, books, education, print, and translation, AI and knowledge production as well as the politics of archives and counter-archiving practices in the contemporary Middle East.
Ganjavi’s book, Education and the Cultural Cold War in the Middle East: The Franklin Book Programs in Iran (2023), received the Middle East Librarians Association (MELA) 2023 Book Award. His second monograph (co-authored), titled Revolutionary Engineers: Learning, Politics, and Activism at Aryamehr University of Technology, is published by MIT Press in 2025. Ganjavi’s scholarly writings, essays, and reviews have appeared in The American Archivist, International Journal of Lifelong Education, Encyclopaedia Iranica, Iranian Studies, and Review of Middle East Studies.