Iran and Persian Studies Dissertation Reviews

Tom Mullaney
1 minute read

We are thrilled to announce the launch of “Iran and Persian Studies Dissertation Reviews,” which will bring you friendly, non-critical overviews of recently defended, unpublished dissertations from Iran and Persian Studies. Like all the other series on this website, “Iran and Persian Studies” will feature reviews and guides for archives, libraries and collections around the world. If you are interested in reviewing for the new series, having your dissertation reviewed, contributing a “Fresh from the Archives” or “Talking Shop” article, or helping out in some other way, please contact assef.ashraf@dissertationreviews.org.

Introducing Our New Field Editor

Assef Ashraf is a PhD candidate in the Department of History at Yale University. His dissertation, “From Khan to Shah: The Rise of a Qajar Political and Court Culture in Iran, 1785-1848,” examines the efforts by early Qajar rulers to consolidate their power through kinship ties, marriage alliances, and patronage of the arts. More broadly, his interests include the early modern and modern history of Iran, early modern Muslim empires, travel literature, and the culture and economy of gift-exchange.

Image: Iranian glazed ceramic tile work, from the ceiling of the Tomb of Hafez in Shiraz, Iran. Photograph by pentocelo, Wikimedia Commons.

Post written by: Tom Mullaney

Thomas S. Mullaney is Associate Professor of Modern Chinese History at Stanford University, having received his Ph.D. in History in 2006 from Columbia University. He is the author of Coming to Terms with the Nation: Ethnic Classification in Modern China (University of California Press, 2011, Foreword by Benedict Anderson). This book charts the history of China’s 1954 Ethnic Classification project (minzu shibie), a joint social scientific-Communist state expedition wherein a group of ethnologists, linguists, and Party cadres traveled to the most ethnically diverse province in the People’s Republic to determine which minority communities would and would not be officially recognized by the state. He is also principal editor of Critical Han Studies: The History, Representation and Identity of China’s Majority, a pathbreaking volume that examines China’s majority ethnonational group. He is currently writing the first-ever global history of the Chinese typewriter, one of the most significant and misunderstood technological innovations of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.