Vejdani, Farzin

Farzin Vejdani is an Associate Professor of Middle Eastern History at Toronto Metropolitan University, where he teaches courses on the history of Muslim societies, the modern Middle East, the Ottoman Empire, the Mughal Empire, and Middle Eastern and North African cities. He received his PhD from Yale University’s Department of History in 2009 before becoming an Assistant Professor of Iranian history at the University of Arizona (2009-2014). Dr. Vejdani was recently a Visiting Fellow at Massey College (2021-2022). In 2019-2020, he was a Visiting Fellow at Harvard Law School’s Program on Law and Society in the Muslim World. He is currently completing a book-length monograph tentatively titled “Private Sins, Public Crimes: Policing, Punishment, and Authority in Iran.” His book, Making History in Iran: Education, Nationalism, and Print Culture (Stanford University Press, 2014), investigates how cultural institutions and a growing public sphere affected history-writing, and how in turn this writing defined Iranian nationalism. In 2016, it received an Honorable Mention for the Houshang Pourshariati Iranian Studies Book Award. In his other publications, Dr. Vejdani has explored the themes of everyday urban crime, folklore, transnational Persian print networks, and connected histories of the Ottoman Empire, India, and Iran. In addition to being the author of several book chapters, he has published articles in the Journal of Social History, the International Journal of Middle East Studies, the Journal of Religious History, the Journal of Persianate Studies, the International Journal of Turkish Studies, the British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies, and Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East. He is also the co-editor of Iran Facing Others: Identity Boundaries in a Historical Perspective (2012).