Stanford Iranian Studies Program

Stanford Iranian Studies Program

The Hamid and Christina Moghadam Program in Iranian Studies fosters the interdisciplinary study of Iran as a civilization. Each academic year, the Program offers undergraduate courses related to Iran in such disciplines as language, literature, economics, and political science. It provides a wealth of events for scholars, students and the general public, which include conferences, symposia, forums, lectures and performances. Listen to one of our podcasts or check out our youtube channel to discover Iran!

  1. 14 mei

    The Iranian Oil Crisis and Mossadegh in the Cold War, 1951-1953 with Jamil Hasanli

    May 14, 2026 In the early 1950s, there were two hot spots of the Cold War: Korea and Iran. Iranian oil had become a firebomb of the Cold War in the Middle East. It was the first oil crisis of the Cold War. The central figure of the dramatic events of 1951-1953 in Iran was Mohammad Mossadegh. He was the most popular national leader of the 20th century. The day before the appointment of Dr. Mossadegh as Prime Minister, the Majlis unanimously supported the law on the nationalization of the Iranian oil industry. However, newly declassified archival documents released after the collapse of the Soviet Union, open documents of CIA, British special services and Turkish diplomatic archives have further enriched our understanding of the first oil crisis of the Cold War in Iran. This talk is based on Dr. Hasanli's forthcoming book The Iranian Oil Crisis and Mossadegh in the Cold War, 1949-1953 (Routledge, 2026). Dr. Jamil Hasanli is a Senior Fellow at the Institute of Historical Research (SAS) of the University of London. He was advisor to the president of Azerbaijan in 1993 and served two terms as a Member of Parliament of Azerbaijan in 2000-2010. In 2013, he was a candidate for the presidential election, representing the united opposition. Professor Hasanli was a History and Public Policy Scholar of the Woodrow Wilson International Center in 2011, and 2020. He received the 2015 Ion Ratiu Democracy Award of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. 2016-2017 he was scholar at the Cold War Center at East China Normal University in Shanghai. Dr. Hasanli is the author of several books published in Azerbaijan, Russia, USA, UK, Turkey, Iran, Hong Kong (China) and other countries. Fouг of his monographs were published in the Harvard Cold War Studies Book Series. *Correction note from the speaker: At the 56:49 mark it is "11 tons of gold," not "11 thousand tons."

    The Iranian Oil Crisis and Mossadegh in the Cold War, 1951-1953 with Jamil Hasanli

  2. 1 mei

    Iran in Transition: Iran’s Security Forces and the Future of Political Order with Saeid Golkar

    May 1, 2026 This lecture examines the role of Iran’s security forces in shaping the country’s political future amid deep uncertainty. Focusing on the IRGC, the Basij, and the broader coercive apparatus, it analyzes these institutions not only as instruments of repression but also as central political actors. Taking seriously the possibility that Iran may face a different political order by the time of this presentation, the lecture asks how security institutions may shape the outcome of a crisis, whether through regime survival, internal fragmentation, managed transition, or the consolidation of a new regime. Saeid Golkar is the UC Foundation Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga. He specializes in the politics of authoritarian regimes, with a particular focus on Iran and the broader Middle East. He earned his PhD in Political Science from the University of Tehran and previously held research and teaching positions at Stanford University and Northwestern University. Golkar is the author of Captive Society: The Basij Militia and Social Control in Post-Revolutionary Iran (Columbia University Press, 2015), which received the Washington Institute’s Silver Medal Prize. His forthcoming book, Dictators and the Higher Education Dilemma, will be published by Rutgers University Press in spring 2026.

    Iran in Transition: Iran’s Security Forces and the Future of Political Order with Saeid Golkar

  3. 22 apr

    The Myth of Maximum Pressure on Iran with Matin Mirramezani and Sam Samani

    This is a recording of a webinar held by the Stanford Iranian Studies Program on April 15, 2026. This discussion evaluates the conventional wisdom surrounding U.S. sanctions on Iran. The paper in discussion from the Stanford Iran 2040 Project is available: https://iranian-studies.stanford.edu/publications/irans-exports-under-sanctions-myth-maximum-pressure Data from this paper shows that Iran's oil exports have not only recovered from their lowest points under strict sanctions, but now surpass the peak levels seen during the JCPOA. The authors explore the primary causes behind this rebound. The discussion also dissects the intricate barter system that allows Iran to trade oil for goods, technology, and infrastructure projects, bypassing the international financial system. They analyze how this mechanism funnels resources to entities like the IRGC, fueling both domestic suppression and foreign aggression. Finally, they assess the future of this paradigm and its implications for Iran. Matin Mirramezani manages the Stanford Iran 2040 Project and has been a contributor to the project since 2018. He studied economics at Stanford and co-founded the Generation Lab, a youth-focused data intelligence company. He is passionate about innovative research methods and policies that promote development. He is also the co-author of The Struggle for Development in Iran (SUP, 2022). Sam Samani is a senior at Stanford University studying Political Science with a minor in Iranian Studies. His research focuses on Iranian elite politics, institutional continuity, and U.S. policy toward Iran, with particular attention to sanctions, succession dynamics, and state capacity. He has conducted research with the Hoover Institution and the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and has professional experience at the U.S. Department of the Treasury. Part of the Stanford Iran 2040 Project: goto.stanford.edu/iran2040

    The Myth of Maximum Pressure on Iran with Matin Mirramezani and Sam Samani

  4. 22 apr

    Tahira Qurrat al-'Ayn's Sisters of the Pen: Some Early Babi Women Poets with Dominic Brookshaw

    April 22, 2026 Fatima Baraghani, who is better known to history by her Shaykhi epithet, Qurrat al-‘Ayn, and her Babi penname, Tahira, was born in Qazvin in 1814 and executed in Tehran in 1852. A prominent follower first of Sayyid Kazim Rashti (d. 1843) and then the Bab (Sayyid ‘Ali-Muhammad Shirazi; executed 1850), Tahira played a significant role in the development and spread of both Shaykhism and Babism – two of the most radical movements to emerge out of Twelver Shi‘ism in Qajar Iran. As well as a charismatic orator and a learned theologian, Tahira was also an accomplished poet who used her original compositions and her reworkings of well-known poems by others to captivate her interlocutors and convince them of the veracity of her beliefs. In this lecture, Dr. Brookshaw will present poems by three of Tahira’s female contemporaries: a Shaykhi woman from Khurasan and two Qajar initiates of the Ni‘matullahi Sufi order. These women variously associated closely with Tahira in Karbala, Hamadan, and Tehran. Guided by their mentor, they joined the Babi movement. He argues that it is only through studying poets such as these that we can gain insight into the nature of the female-only social circles Tahira moved within that are hinted at in the vaguest terms in the extant chronicles and eyewitness accounts of the period. Dominic Parviz Brookshaw is Professor of Persian Literature and Iranian Culture at the University of Oxford and Senior Research Fellow in Persian at Wadham College, Oxford. From 2011 - 2013, he was Assistant Professor of Persian and Comparative Literature at Stanford University. He has published widely on premodern and modern Persian literature, and his articles have appeared in peer-reviewed journals including Iranian Studies, Middle Eastern Literatures, and IRAN: Journal of the British Institute of Persian Studies. His most recent book, Hafiz and His Contemporaries: Poetry, Performance, and Patronage in Fourteenth-century Iran (Bloomsbury, 2019), won the Saidi-Sirjani Book Award in 2020. He serves currently as the President of the Association for Iranian Studies. Part of the Stanford Festival of Iranian Arts

    Tahira Qurrat al-'Ayn's Sisters of the Pen: Some Early Babi Women Poets with Dominic Brookshaw

  5. 4 feb

    Whither Iran: Stanford Scholars and Students on Current Developments and Trajectories

    February 4, 2026 Panel discussion with Stanford scholars and students to discuss current events related to Iran. Cosponsored by the Iran Democracy Project at the Hoover Institution. PANELISTS (in order of appearance) Larry Diamond is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and the Mosbacher Senior Fellow in Global Democracy at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI) at Stanford University. He also chairs the Hoover Institution Project on Taiwan in the Indo-Pacific Region and is the principal investigator of the Global Digital Policy Incubator, part of Stanford’s Cyber Policy Center. For more than six years, he directed FSI’s Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law, where he now leads its Program on Arab Reform and Democracy. He is the founding coeditor of the Journal of Democracy and also serves as senior consultant at the International Forum for Democratic Studies of the National Endowment for Democracy. H.R. McMaster is the Fouad and Michelle Ajami Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University. He is also the Bernard and Susan Liautaud Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute and lecturer at Stanford University’s Graduate School of Business. McMaster holds a PhD in military history from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He is the author of multiple bestselling books and has published many essays, articles, and book reviews on leadership, history, and the future of warfare. Abbas Milani is the Director of the Hamid and Christina Moghadam Program in Iranian Studies at Stanford University, Adjunct Professor and co-director of the Iran Democracy Project, and a research fellow at the Hoover Institution. His expertise is U.S.-Iran relations as well as Iranian cultural, political, and security issues. Milani has authored and translated numerous books in Persian and English and published more than 250 essays and book reviews in journals and papers. He is currently completing a book on Reza Shah. Matin Mirramezani manages the Stanford Iran 2040 Project and has been a contributor to the project since 2018. He studied economics at Stanford and co-founded the Generation Lab, a youth-focused data intelligence company. He is passionate about innovative research methods and policies that promote development. He is also the co-author of The Struggle for Development in Iran (SUP, 2022). Mobina Riazi is a master’s student in communications at Stanford University, with an emphasis on media studies. She earned her bachelor’s degree in political science, with a minor in Iranian studies, from Stanford University in 2025. Her research focuses on media, governance, and the law, with particular attention to digital repression and state power in authoritarian contexts. Sam Samani is a senior at Stanford University studying Political Science with a minor in Iranian Studies. His research focuses on Iranian elite politics, institutional continuity, and U.S. policy toward Iran, with particular attention to sanctions, succession dynamics, and state capacity. He has conducted research with the Hoover Institution and the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and has professional experience at the U.S. Department of the Treasury. Sam is currently completing an honors thesis on Iran’s political elite and is a course reader for Dr. Milani's courses on modern Iranian politics and U.S. relations with Iran. Bailey Ulbricht, JD ’22, is the founding Executive Director at the Stanford Humanitarian Program, where she works on legal projects aimed at reducing harm in conflict settings and other insecure environments. Her research interests include laws governing the use of force and the intersection of technology and international humanitarian and human rights law, including how technology can be leveraged to gather evidence of possible legal violations. Michael McFaul is the Ken Olivier and Angela Nomellini Professor of International Studies in Political Science, Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, and the Peter and Helen Bing Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, all at Stanford University. He joined the Stanford faculty in 1995 and served as FSI Director from 2015 to 2025. He is also an international affairs analyst for MSNOW.

    Whither Iran: Stanford Scholars and Students on Current Developments and Trajectories

  6. 2 feb

    City of Unrest: A Geolocated Archive of Protests in Tehran (2009-2023)

    February 2, 2026 Mohsen B. Mesgaren Matin Mirramezani Mohsen Amiri Read the report: http://goto.stanford.edu/tehranprotests The contemporary history of Iran has been closely bound up with recurring waves of large-scale protests. From those preceding the Constitutional Revolution, the 1979 Revolution, as well as numerous demonstrations with demands ranging from the incremental to the radical, with a range of causes such as social, political, or economical. Iran’s capital, Tehran, has consistently served as a staging ground for crowds that have “poured into” the streets to voice their dissent. Most existing studies of protests in Iran rely on individual narratives or media portrayals. In the vacuum of on-the-ground reporting and empirical evidence, the current understanding of protests in Iran primarily relies on speculations and anecdotes. This study adopts a data-driven approach by compiling a structured, open-sourced archive of protests in the capital city of Tehran as the foundation for deeper analysis. This research is grounded in an original dataset of over 8,500 protest observations compiled by the authors. This comprehensive dataset was derived from a universe of about 120,000 visual documents and text-based news reports between 2009 and 2024. Each protest observation was systematically reviewed and tagged. We use this information to provide an overview of the temporal and spatial characteristics of the protests in Tehran and analyze the evolving discourse of dissent using chants from these protests. This granular data allows for an unprecedented, evidence-based look at how protest tactics and public sentiment have evolved in Iran's capital. Mohsen B. Mesgaran is an Associate Professor at the University of California, Davis, and a Senior Research Fellow at the United Nations University Institute for Water, Environment, and Health (UNU-INWEH), where he leads the Ecological Modeling and Food Security. Prior to joining UC Davis, he was a Research Scientist at Stanford University's Iranian Studies Program (Stanford Iran 2040 Project), where he conducted large-scale, data-driven studies related to land and water resources in Iran, which culminated in the co-authorship of the book The Struggle for Development in Iran (SUP, 2022) https://www.sup.org/books/politics/st.... Mohsen Amiri is a researcher working on urban studies and data-driven analysis of protest and dissent in Iran. He has collaborated with the Stanford Iran 2040 Project on spatiotemporal datasets on protests and urban unrest, contributing to mapping protest dynamics in Tehran and other cities. His work combines GIS and discourse analysis to examine how space and power interact during mass mobilization. He is preparing to begin his PhD at the University of Sydney, focusing on urban revolt and repression in Iran between 2009 and 2022. Matin Mirramezani manages the Stanford Iran 2040 Project and has been a contributor to the project since 2018. He studied economics at Stanford and co-founded the Generation Lab, a youth-focused data intelligence company. He is passionate about innovative research methods and policies that promote development. He is also the co-author of The Struggle for Development in Iran (SUP, 2022). Part of the Stanford Iran 2040 Project

    City of Unrest: A Geolocated Archive of Protests in Tehran (2009-2023)

  7. 22 jan

    The Untold Stories of Ten Thousand Years of Iran’s History

    January 22, 2026 In this talk Prof. Ghadiri will discuss the beginnings of history and civilization in Iran based on recent scholarly theories; an examination of the causes behind the neglect of Iran’s authentic ancient past—one that extends far beyond the Median and Achaemenid eras—and an articulation of the benefits of adopting an informed and accurate understanding of Iran’s historical heritage. Bahram Ghadiri was born in 1949 in Tehran, Iran. He graduated from Tehran University, where he studied under noted philosophers on Islamic and Persian art and architecture such as Titus Burkhardt, Henry Corbin and Hossein Nasr. His interest in the traditional art and architecture led him to engage in practical learning with master-masons and artists. At the age of 28 he became the Director of Niyavaran National Cultural Center, one of the most prestigious centers for art and architecture in Iran. Among his many projects in Iran are the restoration and revitalization of Akhavan Sigari Mansion (Yazd), Tajrish Municipal Libraries (Tehran), Main Entrance Gate to Bazaar Shishegar Khaneh (Tabriz), Seyed Aladin Hossein Mausoleum (a village near Hamadan), Miandasht Caravansary Complex (Miandasht on Silkroad), Dar Al-fonun School (Tehran), and Khan Bathhouse (Yazd Bazaar). In 2001, the Khan Bathhouse was the winner of the Aga Khan Foundation Award for Architecture prize. As a professor of Historic Preservation in the School of Architecture & Urban Planning, Shahid Beheshti University from 1986 to 2003, Prof. Ghadiri led 16 years of research on Persian bazaars, a first of its kind in the nation, involving over 800 graduate students. The result was a complete survey of the physical and non-physical elements, and developing a methodology for study of bazaars and their causes of decay. He also served as visiting professor at the School of Architecture & Urban Planning at Yazd University and Isfahan University (1995-2001). Prof. Ghadiri is the author of four books, 30 articles and over a half a dozen academic handouts on topics of conservation and preservation of Iranian historical building, city fabric, and bazaars. He is also the founder and president of Foundation for Persian Archaeological Studies.

    The Untold Stories of Ten Thousand Years of Iran’s History

  8. 02-12-2025

    The Friendship That Never Was: Iran-Saudi Relations from 1968 to 1979

    December 2, 2025 Contrary to the widely held narrative portraying Iran and Saudi Arabia as cooperative partners during the reign of Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, recently declassified diplomatic records and personal accounts from those close to the Shah reveal a far more complex picture. In the wake of Britain’s withdrawal from the Persian Gulf in 1971, the region entered a moment of uncertainty. One that seemed to offer both Iran and Saudi Arabia a chance to shape a new regional order. For a brief moment, the Shah appeared willing to engage in genuine partnership, seeking stability through coordination with Riyadh under the broader umbrella of the Nixon Doctrine. Yet, this early openness soon gave way to a vision defined by hierarchy rather than cooperation. Convinced of Iran’s historical and strategic superiority, the Shah began to imagine a Persian Gulf order centered on Iranian dominance, in which Saudi Arabia would play a secondary, supportive role. His ambitions were encouraged by American security guarantees but constrained by the limits of dependence on them - a paradox that defined Iran’s fragile autonomy during the 1970s. Drawing on newly accessible archives, including the Zahedi Papers at the Hoover Institution Library & Archives, and first-hand testimonies, this lecture traces how shifting regional power dynamics, personal rivalries, and the politics of prestige shaped Iran’s approach to its Arab neighbors. It revisits key turning points, including the 1971 island crisis, to show how mistrust between Tehran and Riyadh deepened despite superficial gestures of unity. Ultimately, the lecture asks why the promise of cooperation between the two states never materialized, and what this failed friendship reveals about the tension between ambition and constraint that continues to define Iran’s role in the Persian Gulf to this day. Diba Mirzaei is a researcher at the German Institute for Global and Area Studies (GIGA) and a PhD candidate at the University of Hamburg. Her dissertation, “Iran’s Foreign Policy toward Saudi Arabia from 1968–1979: Fragile Autonomy under the Nixon Doctrine” (submitted in June 2025), explores how Iran’s policy toward Saudi Arabia intersected with interpretations of the Shah’s autonomy. Mirzaei’s research interests include Iranian foreign policy and feminist approaches to international relations. Prior to her doctoral studies, she worked at the German Federal Foreign Office in the field of humanitarian assistance.

    The Friendship That Never Was: Iran-Saudi Relations from 1968 to 1979
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The Hamid and Christina Moghadam Program in Iranian Studies fosters the interdisciplinary study of Iran as a civilization. Each academic year, the Program offers undergraduate courses related to Iran in such disciplines as language, literature, economics, and political science. It provides a wealth of events for scholars, students and the general public, which include conferences, symposia, forums, lectures and performances. Listen to one of our podcasts or check out our youtube channel to discover Iran!

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    Stanford Iranian Studies Program
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    2010 - 2026
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