Afshin Marashi

Phone: 405-325-6671
Email: amarashi@ou.edu
Personal Homepage   

Afshin Marashi is Professor and Farzaneh Family Chair in Modern Iranian History at the University of Oklahoma. From 2011-2020 he served as the founding director of the university’s Center for Iranian Studies. He has also served on the editorial boards of the International Journal of Middle East Studies (IJMES) and the Journal of Persianate Studies. Dr. Marashi’s research focuses on the cultural and intellectual history of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Iranian nationalism, in its comparative, transnational, and global contexts. His most recent book, Exile and the Nation: The Parsi Community of India and the Making of Modern Iran (University of Texas Press, 2020), received honorable mention for the Hamid Naficy Iranian Studies Book Award. He is also the author of Nationalizing Iran: Culture, Power, and the State, 1870-1940 (University of Washington Press, 2008) and is the co-editor of numerous edited volumes and special issues of journals. Dr. Marashi also serves as the co-editor of the book series, “Connected Histories of the Middle East and the Global South” at the University of Texas Press.

Monographs

Edited Books

Edited Collections

• “‘A Sufism for the Age of Electricity’: The Early History of Pishāhangi (scouting) in Iran,” in Roham Alvandi, Afshin Marashi, and David Motadel eds., The Making of Iranian Modernity: Studies in Honor of Houchang E. Chehabi (Ilex/Harvard University Press, 2025), 110-132.
• · “‘Rich Fields in Persia’: Parsi Capital and the Origins of Economic Development in Pahlavi Iran, 1925-1941,” Iranian Studies 56, no.1 (2023): 61-83.
• · “Parsi Textual Philanthropy: Print Commerce and the Revival of Zoroastrianism in Early 20th-Century Iran.” In India and Iran in the Longue Durée, edited by Alka Patel and Touraj Daryaee, 125-42. Irvine, CA, UCI Jordan Center for Persian Studies, Ancient Iran Series, Vol. III, 2017.
• · “After the Persianate: Introduction,” co-authored with Mana Kia, Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East 36, no. 3 (2016): 379-83.
• · “Print Culture and Its Publics: A Social History of Bookstores in Tehran, 1900-1950,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 47, no. 1 (2015): 89-108.
• · “Paradigms of Iranian Nationalism: History, Theory, and Historiography.” In Rethinking Iranian Nationalism and Modernity, edited by Kamran Scot Aghaie and Afshin Marashi, 3-24. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 2014.
• · “Patron and Patriot: Dinshah J. Irani and the Revival of Indo-Iranian Culture,” Iranian Studies 46, no. 2 (2013): 186-206.
• · “Imagining Hāfez: Rabindranath Tagore in Iran, 1932,” Journal of Persianate Studies 3, no. 1 (2010): 46-77.
• · “The Nation’s Poet: Ferdowsi and the Iranian National Imagination.” In Historiography and Political Culture in Twentieth Century Iran, edited by Touraj Atabaki, 92-111. London: I.B. Tauris, 2009.
• · “Performing the Nation: The Shah’s Official Visit to Kemalist Turkey, June to July, 1934. In The Making of Modern Iran, edited by Stephanie Cronin, 99-119. London: Routledge, 2003.
• · “Re-Imagining Nationalism: New Studies in Arab, Turkish, and Israeli Historiography,” Critique: A Journal for Critical Studies of the Middle East 16 (2000): 89- 103.

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