Lecture: Politics Not Religion: Demystifying Middle East Crises

Dr. Kaveh Ehsani is assistant professor of International Studies at DePaul University in Chicago.

His current research is about the historical and contemporary impact of oil on society and politics; the historical sociology of warfare; the politics of property relations; the urban process and spatial change in Middle East cities; and on the political economy and geopolitics of post-revolution Iran. He is preparing the manuscript of a book, titled The Urban Life of Oil: Abadan and the Making of Modernity in Iran.

His recent publications include, Working for Oil: Comparative Social Histories of Labor in the Global Oil Industry”, co-edited with T. Atabaki and E. Bini (Palgrave, 2018); “The moral economy of Iranian protests,” (with Arang Keshavarzian) Jacobin (2018); “Pipeline politics in Iran”, South Atlantic Quarterly (2017); “War and resentment: Critical reflections on the legacies of the Iran-Iraq War” Middle East Critique (2017); “Oil, state, and society in Iran in the aftermath of WWI”, in The First World War and its Aftermath: The Shaping of the Middle East”, ed. T. Fraser, (Haus, 2015); “The cultural politics of public space in Tehran’s Bookfair”, in H. Chehabi, et.al. eds. Iran in the Middle East: Transnational Encounters and Social History (I.B.Tauris, 2015); “Oil and beyond: Expanding British imperial aspirations, emerging oil capitalism, and the challenge of social questions in the First World War”, in The World During the First World War, eds. H. Bley & A. Kremers (Klarte Verlag, 2014), 261-290, co-authored with Touraj Atabaki; “Radical democracy and public space”, International Journal of Middle East Studies 46:1 (2014); “Politics of Property in the Islamic Republic of Iran”, in S. Amir-Arjomand & Nathan Brown, eds. The Rule of Law, Islam, and Constitutional Politics in Egypt and Iran (SUNY, 2013).

He has been a longstanding member of the editorial boards of the journals Goftogu (Dialogue) in Tehran, Middle East Report (Merip), and Iranian Studies. He is a regular media commentator about domestic and international Iranian politics.

Date: Wednesday, April 4, 2018
Time: 6:00 pm Light Refreshments; 6:15 pm Talk followed by Q&A
Where: Conference Hall, Main Bldg, American Islamic College