afsaneh najmabadi

Born in Iran, Afsaneh Najmabadi came to Radcliffe College from Tehran University in 1966. With initial BA (Radcliffe 1968) and MA (Harvard 1970) degrees in physics, she later pursued social studies, combining academic interests with her engagement in social activism, first in the U.S. and then in Iran. She completed her Ph.D. (1984) in sociology in University of Manchester (U.K.).

She has recently completed a manuscript Women with Mustaches and Men without Beards: Gender and Sexual Anxieties of Iranian Modernity (University of California Press, forthcoming 2005), a study of cultural transformations in 19th-century Iran centered on reconfigurations of gender and sexuality, and is working on a new project, "Genealogies of Iranian Feminism."