Manijeh Moradian
Manijeh Moradian is associate professor of Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies at Barnard College, Columbia University. She received her PhD in American Studies from NYU and her MFA in creative nonfiction from Hunter College, City University of New York. She is the former co-director of the Association of Iranian American Writers. Her research focuses on political cultures of the Iranian diaspora in the U.S., tracing generational shifts in transnational activism and cultural production across the historical arc of U.S.-Iran relations. Her methodological approach takes seriously memory, affect and emotion as an archive of marginalized knowledges, gendered histories and diasporic identity formations that can disrupt assimilation and produce alternatives to heteronormative model minority subjectivity. Her book, This Flame Within: Iranian Revolutionaries in the United States (Duke University Press, 2022) won the 2024 Hamid Naficy Book Award for the best book in Iranian Diaspora Studies from the Association of Iranian Studies and the Center for Iranian Diaspora Studies. The book also received an Honorable Mention for the 2023 Middle East Studies Association Nikki Keddie Book Award. Her essays and articles have appeared in Hyperallgeric, Radical History Review, Meridians, Journal of Asian American Studies, Journal of Iranian Studies, American Quarterly, Routledge Handbook of the Global Sixties, Scholar & Feminist online, Women’s Studies Quarterly, Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East, Social Text online, jadaliyya.com, and Callaloo. She is a founding member of the Raha Iranian Feminist Collective and a member of the Feminists For Jina Global Network.
Her second book project, Transnational Iran: Experiments in Reimaging Diaspora, considers the impact of resistance and repression in Iran on Iranian diasporic politics and aesthetics. The book theorizes diaspora as a contested space from which feminist and queer critiques of nationalism, militarism, and hetero-patriarchy have emerged to challenge conventional geopolitical framings of the “US-Iran” conflict.
Her research focuses on political cultures of the Iranian diaspora in the U.S., tracing generational shifts in subjectivity, transnational activism, and cultural production across the historical arc of U.S.-Iran relations. Her methodological approach takes seriously memory, affect and emotion as an archive of marginalized knowledges, gendered histories and diasporic identity formations that can disrupt assimilation and produce alternatives to heteronormative model minority subjectivity.
- SWANA (Southwest Asian North African) Diasporas
- Affect and Activism
- Gender and Power in Transnational Perspective
- Gender, Globalization and Empire
- Intersectional Feminism
- Senior Seminar (Capstone)
- National Women's Studies Association
- American Studies Association
- Association of Asian American Studies
- Middle East Studies Association
Book:
This Flame Within: Iranian Revolutionaries in the United States. Duke University Press, 2022.
Peer-reviewed Articles:
"Feminist Uprising in Iran and the Politics of Solidarity." Meridians: Feminism, Race, Transnationalism. (25:1), April 2026, 156–181.
"Iran in Crisis: Seven Essays on the Obstacles to Freedom," Introduction to the dossier, co-authored and co-edited with Ida Nikou. Jadaliyya.com, February 24, 2026.
"Decolonial Diasporas: Iranian Feminist Solidarity in Global Context." Iranian Studies. December, 2025;58(4):1026-1034.
"Resisting Authoritarianism and War: An Iranian Left Feminist Perspective." Communication, Culture, and Critique. Vol. 18, Issue 3, November 2025.
"Iranian Feminist Solidarity with Palestine." Palestine Now, Maya Mikdashi, Jasbir K. Puar, and Helga Tawil-Souri, eds. Social Text online, February 2025.
"Embodying Revolution: Situating Iran within transnational feminist solidarities." Radical History Review. 148, January 2024, 164–170.
"Affects of Solidarity: Remapping Asian American in Theory and Practice." Journal of Asian American Studies. Vol. 26, No. 2, June 2023, 155–166.
"'Down with the Shah!' Political Racialization and the Iranian Foreign Student Revolt." American Quarterly. Vol. 74, No. 3, September 2022, 713–736.
"Iranian Diasporic Possibilities: Tracing Transnational Feminist Genealogies from the Revolutionary Margins," The Global 1979 Revolution: The Iranian Revolution After Forty Years, Cambridge University Press, July 2021.
"Reading Fannie Lou Hamer in Tehran: Amitis Motevalli's Queer Art of Afro-Asian Solidarity." Scholar and Feminist Online. Barnard Center for Research on Women, Issue 14.3, 2018.
"The Iranian Student Movement and the Making of Global 1968." Co-authored with Afshin Matin-asgari in Martin Klimke, ed. Routledge Handbook of the Global Sixties. New York: Routledge, March 2018.
"'Women can do anything men can do': Gender and the Affects of Solidarity in the U.S. Iranian Student Movement (1965-1979)." Women's Studies Quarterly. Fall-Winter 2014, 127–145.
"The Islamic Republic Loves OWS: Is This What Solidarity Looks Like?" Fall 2012. Social Text online.
"In Search of Iran: Resistant Melancholia in Iranian American Memoirs of Return." Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East. 31(2): 2011, 487-497.
"New Middle Eastern Uprisings: Gender, Class, and Security Politics in Egypt and Iran." Social Text online. March 2011.