Mehri Rezaee
Visiting Scholar, Farzaneh Family Center for Iranian and Persian Gulf Studies
Mehri Rezaee is a visiting scholar from Afghanistan. She holds a doctorate in international law from Allameh Tabatabaei University and a master's degree in international law from Tehran University, Iran. She has taught international law and human rights at the undergraduate and graduate level for over eight years at universities in Afghanistan.
Dr. Rezaee served as commissioner and chairwoman of the Ghor Provincial Complaints Commission during the 2018 parliamentary election, and for the 2019 presidential election she served as commissioner and chairwoman at Bamiyan Provincial Complaints Commission.
She has also worked as a human rights, women, and children expert in the office of the second vice president of Afghanistan before the Taliban takeover of Kabul. At the same time, she was working as a researcher at the Holding Group for Afghanistan Institute for Legal Challenges of Afghan Women.
Dr. Rezaee's area of expertise is human rights and women’s rights, and she has published several articles on Afghan women’s rights in domestic and foreign journals. The topic of her Ph.D. dissertation was the interaction of the international law system and Afghan law in the fight against human trafficking from Afghanistan. Her master's thesis focused on the most important legal challenges for women in Afghanistan — namely education, violence, and forced marriage.
Dr. Rezaee was introduced to the University of Oklahoma through an Iranian friend, Dr. Fatemeh Shams, and she applied to the Scholars at Risk program at The University of Oklahoma. She arrived in the United States on May 25, 2022, and has been taking English courses at the Center for English as a Second Language. The Scholars at Risk program, Dean Scott Fritzen, and Marjan Seirafi-Pour and Joshua Landis of the Farzaneh Family Center worked together to coordinate her visiting scholar position, which was made possible by a generous donation from the Farzaneh family.
During the fall 2022 semester Dr. Rezaee will teach in OU's Persian/Farsi language program as an assistant professor. She will continue her English courses with CESL as well, and hopes to prepare a lecture for students on the interaction of international law and Afghan law in the fight against human trafficking (the subject of her dissertation). She also plans to prepare a speech on the legal foundations of the Hazara genocide in Afghanistan.
From Dr. Rezaee: "Norman is a beautiful, peaceful and lovely city. I love the University of Oklahoma and my educated, kind and friendly colleagues, and I am very happy to work at this university. I hope that I can have a good and beneficial cooperation with the Department of International Studies and the Iranian Studies Center in this semester."
