Reading Iran: American Academics and the Last Shah

Abstract

Despite the nature of American influence in postwar Iran, and despite the fact that Iranian studies has grown into a flourishing field in the United States, scholars have not explored the field's origins during the Cold War era. This article begins with the life of T. Cuyler Young to trace the critical genealogy within the field as it developed, in cooperation between American and Iranian scholars, during the reign of Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi. It proceeds to analyze two cohorts of American scholars whose political inclinations ranged from liberal reformism to revolutionary Marxism. As revolutionary momentum swelled in Iran in the late 1970s, critical scholars broke through superpower dogmas and envisioned a post-shah Iran. However, Cold War teleologies prevented them from fully grasping Iranian realities, particularly Khomeini's vision for Iran. This article argues that the modern field of Iranian studies in the United States was shaped by multiple generations of critical voices, all of which were informed by historically situated encounters with Iran and expressed through a range of methodological and theoretical perspectives.

Gender differences in the professional experiences of Iran specialists in American academia

“…To that extent, Deeb and Winegar provide a relevant and rigorous point of comparison. There are other important studies of Middle East Studies (Amanat and Bernhardsson 2007 ; Khalil 2008 , 2014 , 2016 ; Lockman 2005 , 2007 , 2016 ) and Iranian Studies (Foster 2007; Shannon 2017 , 2018 ), but these focus on the connections between foreign policy and academia (including the institutional history of area studies programs), not the experiences of a category of scholars within American academia. Indeed, one reviewer of Lockman’s 2016 book noted the conspicuous absence of both women and region-related names from his account of the rise of Middle East Studies, less as a criticism of Lockman than as a recognition of the fact that the field in the USA was largely shaped by “Ivy League-educated, well-off, Protestant elite men (Miller-Idriss 2018 , 715).”…”