Nayereh Tohidi
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Nayereh Esfahlani Tohidi | |
|---|---|
| Born | 1951 (age 73–74)[1] Iran |
| Other names | Nayyirah Tawhidi |
| Alma mater | University of Tehran, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, California State University, Northridge |
Nayereh Esfahlani Tohidi (Persian: نیره توحیدی; born 1951)[2][1] is an Iranian-born American professor, researcher, and academic administrator. Tohidi is a professor emerita and former chair of gender and women’s studies, and the founding director of the Middle Eastern and Islamic studies (from 2011 to 2021) at California State University, Northridge.[3]
She is also a research associate at the Center for Near Eastern Studies of University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), where she had coordinated the Bilingual Lecture Series on Iran since 2003.[4] She specializes in the fields of gender, Islam, feminism, modernity, and democracy; ethnicity and ethno-religious movements; and human and women's rights in the Persianate and Turkic Societies of the Middle East, the Caucasus and Central Asia.[5][unreliable source?]
Her teaching and research areas include sociology of gender, religion (Islam), ethnicity and democracy in the Middle East and post-Soviet Central Eurasia, especially Iran and Azerbaijan.[6] She is the recipient of several grants, fellowships and research awards, including a year of Fulbright lectureship and research at the Academy of Sciences of the Soviet Republic of Azerbaijan; post-doctoral fellowships at Harvard University;[7] the Hoover Institute of Stanford University; the Kennan Institute of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars;[8] and the Keddie-Balzan Fellowship at the Center for Near Eastern Studies at UCLA.[9]
She has held visiting positions at the University of Iowa, the University of Minnesota, Harvard University, University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), and the University of Southern California (USC).[when?] In 2015, she was awarded a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities to develop and launch a minor in Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies in California State University, Northridge.[10][11]
Tohidi's publications include editorship or authorship of Globalization, Gender and Religion: The Politics of Women’s Rights in Catholic and Muslim Contexts; Women in Muslim Societies: Diversity within Unity; and Feminism, Democracy and Islamism in Iran. Her work has appeared in Ms. magazine.[12]
Education
- Teacher Training Credential, California State University, Northridge, 1984 to 1986
- BS, Psychology (Major), Sociology (Minor), University of Tehran, Iran, 1975
- MA, Educational Psychology (Human Development), University of Illinois, Urbana Champaign, 1979
- Ph.D., Educational Psychology (Socio-Cultural Perspectives), University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, 1983
