Rupture and Continuity in Iran : An Emergency Teach-In On the Historical and Political Context of the January 2026 Uprising

What are the social and political dynamics of change and continuity in Iran today? In this discussion, Dr. Naghmeh Sohrabi and Dr. Eskandar Sadeghi-Boroujerdi shed light on the historical and political context that has led to the most recent wave of unrest in Iran. The discussion was moderated by CCMS research assistant, Parsa Alirezaei.

Discussants and Moderator:

Dr. Naghmeh Sohrabi (Discussant)

Naghmeh Sohrabi is the Charles (Corky) Goodman Professor of Middle East History and the Director for Research at the Crown Center for Middle East Studies. She is the author of the book Taken for Wonder: Nineteenth Century Travel Accounts from Iran to Europe (Oxford University Press, 2012) and numerous articles on Iranian history, politics, and culture. She is the 2014-15 recipient of the Andrew W. Mellon New Directions Fellowship, and in 2017-18, along with Prof. Greg Childs she received a Mellon-Sawyer Seminar Fellowship in Comparative Revolutions. In 2015 she was awarded the Bernstein Faculty Fellowship and in 2019 the Michael L. Walzer award for teaching excellence. She is currently writing a book on the experiences of the 1979 revolution in Iran for which she has also received an ACLS fellowship in 2020-2021, the Berlin prize from the American Academy in Berlin in Spring 2021, and the Bellagio Center residency from the Rockefeller Foundation in 2025. Professor Sohrabi was a member of the International Advisory Board, Oriental Institute, Czech Academy of Science, member of Advisory Board, Women’s World in Qajar Iran: A Digital Archive, and the president of the Association for Iranian Studies from 2020-2022.

Dr. Eskandar Sadeghi-Boroujerdi (Discussant)

Dr Eskandar Sadeghi-Boroujerdi is Lecturer (Assistant Professor) in the International Relations of the Middle East in the School of International Relations at the University of St Andrews. He is the author of Revolution and Its Discontents: Political Thought and Reform in Iran (Cambridge University Press, 2019), co-editor of Political Parties in the Middle East (2019), and editor of the expanded edition of Fred Halliday’s Iran: Dictatorship and Development (2024). He is a series editor of Radical Histories of the Middle East and has published commentary and analysis in Jadaliyya, The Guardian, New Left Review, Foreign Policy, and Jacobin.

Parsa Alirezaei (Moderator)

Parsa Alirezaei is a research assistant at the Centre for Comparative Muslim Studies. Previously, he was an intern at the International Court of Justice and a researcher at Law for Palestine. His work focuses on the geopolitics and political economy of protracted national self-determination movements in MENA.