Farzaneh Hall 207
Email: kanejad@ou.edu
Kayhan A. Nejad is the Farzaneh Family Assistant Professor of Iranian Studies at the University of Oklahoma Department of International and Area Studies. An historian and international studies scholar by training, Nejad earned his Ph.D. in History from Yale University in 2021. Before joining OU, he served as a Nizami Ganjavi Centre Visiting Fellow at the University of Oxford, and as a Senior Researcher with the Fulbright U.S. Scholar Program at Sabanci University in Istanbul.
Nejad’s research centers the linkages between the greater Middle East and former Soviet Union, a space connecting Iran with Russia, the North and South Caucasus, Afghanistan, and Turkey. His book manuscript, From the Oilfield to the Battlefield: Revolutionary Internationalism on the Imperial Borderlands, rethinks the breakdown in ties between Iranian revolutionaries and their foreign supporters to proffer a new explanation for the re-establishment of monarchy in Iran in 1921. Nejad’s second book project examines the collapse of the socialist left and resurgence of the Islamist alternative between the greater Middle East and former Soviet Union from 1991 to the present. As part of this book project, Nejad has submitted or is developing several article manuscripts for peer review, including original research on post-Soviet pan-Caucasianism and the first Taliban government.
At OU, Nejad teaches on modern Iranian history, modern European history, contemporary and historical Iran-U.S. relations, Soviet and post-Soviet nationalisms, and the global history of communism. His published scholarship has appeared in or is forthcoming in Slavic Review, Middle Eastern Studies, and the Encyclopaedia Iranica. Nejad serves as the History Book Review Editor for Iranian Studies, and has coedited an anthology, The Caspian World: Connections and Contentions at a Modern Eurasian Crossroads, forthcoming from Cornell University Press (2024). He is an ardent supporter of orangutan conservation efforts and the great ape personhood movement.
