Seminar Members
Andrew W. Mellon, Sawyer Seminar Postdoctoral Fellows
Manijeh Moradian
Manijeh Moradian received her MFA in creative nonfiction from Hunter College in 2007 and her PhD in American Studies from New York University in 2014. She was a University of California President’s Post-Doctoral Fellow in Asian American Studies at UC Davis and is currently an Andrew W. Mellon Fellow in Comparative Revolutions at Brandeis University. From 2008 to 2011, she co-directed the Association of Iranian American Writers. Her book, Neither Washington, Nor Tehran: Iranian Internationalism in the United States, is forthcoming from Duke University Press. Her essays and articles have appeared or are forthcoming in Routledge Handbook of the Global Sixties, Scholar & Feminist Online, Women’s Studies Quarterly, Comparative Studies of South Asian, Africa, and the Middle East, Social Text online, jadaliyya.com, tehranbureau.com, Bi Taarof, and Callaloo. She is a founding member of Raha Iranian Feminist Collective.
In Spring 2018, Dr. Moradian will be teaching a course in the Department of History titled: Global 1968: Student and Youth Revolutions.
Vivian Solana Moreno
Vivian Solana recently obtained her PhD from the Anthropology Department in Collaboration with the Women and Gender Studies Institute at the University of Toronto. Based on eighteen months of fieldwork in Sahrawi refugee camps located in Southern Algeria, her doctoral dissertation investigates the forms of labor that are sustaining and regenerating the political struggle for the decolonization of the Western Sahara. Focusing on women and youth—key groups for the social reproduction of a Sahrawi revolutionary nationalism—she examines how these constituents reckon with the contradictions produced by the political and economic conditions of the period initiated in 1991, after a UN mediated peace-process inserted the Sahrawi struggle into what she describes as a “colonial meantime.” Her work is situated at the intersection of an anthropology of socio-political transformation and gender studies.
In Fall 2017, Dr. Solana will be teaching a course in the Anthropology Department titled Rethinking Revolution: Ethnographic Explorations into Radical Political Transformation.
Sawyer Seminar Members
- Narges Bajoghli, Postdoctoral Research Associate in International and Public Affairs at the Watson Institute, Brown University
- Patrick Brown, Ph.D. Candidate, Department of History, Brandeis University
- Jeffrey Lenowitz, Meyer and W. Walter Jaffe Assistant Professor of Politics, Brandeis University
- Carlota McAllister, Associate Professor of Anthropology, York University
- Pascal Menoret, Renee and Lester Crown Chair in Modern Middle East Studies and Assistant Professor of Anthropology, Brandeis University
- Max Mischler, Assistant Professor of History, Brandeis University
- Amir Moosavi, Visiting Assistant Professor in Modern Iranian History, Brown University
- Golnar Nikpour, Crown Center for Middle East Studies Post-doctoral Fellow, Brandeis University
- Carina Ray, Associate Professor of African and Afro-American Studies, Brandeis University
- Faith Smith, Associate Professor of African and Afro-American Studies and English, Brandeis University
- Christy Thornton, Assistant Research Professor of Sociology, Johns Hopkins University
- Gowri Vijayakumar, Assistant Professor of Sociology, Brandeis University
- Pu Wang, Assistant Professor of Chinese and the Helaine and Alvin Allen Chair in Literature, Brandeis University