My intellectual trajectory began in the natural sciences, where I completed a BA in chemistry at Shahid Beheshti University, Tehran, Iran. Yet it was outside the laboratory—within the pages of Zanan Magazine, Iran’s most influential feminist monthly—that my enduring intellectual and political concerns took shape. Over seven years as a journalist and editor, I worked at the intersection of public discourse and everyday life, documenting how women navigated law, religion, and state power. These years were foundational: they cultivated an attentiveness to voice, mediation, and representation, while also training me as a close observer of everyday life. Journalism honed an ethnographic sensibility—an attunement to detail, to narrative, to the quiet textures of lived experience—and a deep investment in storytelling, all of which eventually found their analytic home in sociology.
This experience led me to sociology. I completed an MA in sociology at Allameh Tabataba’i University, Tehran, Iran, where I began translating questions first encountered in journalism into sustained analytic inquiry. I then pursued a PhD in sociology at University of California, Berkeley, where my work took on its ethnographic and theoretical grounding. Berkeley was formative in cultivating a mode of critical thinking that pushed me to interrogate categories, assumptions, and scales of analysis. Participation in the Gender Dissertation Group provided an especially generative space to engage deeply with questions of gender, power, and politics, shaping both the conceptual and empirical directions of my first manuscript. A subsequent postdoctoral fellowship at the Harvard Academy for International and Area Studies expanded this work into broader transnational and comparative frameworks.
My academic career has since unfolded across multiple institutional and geographic settings. At American University of Beirut, where I held the Whittlesey Chair in Gender Studies and served as Assistant Professor, I worked within a region marked by both fragmentation and deep historical entanglements—an experience that reinforced my commitment to thinking beyond bounded national frames.
At Syracuse University, my first tenure-track appointment in the Department of Sociology, I further developed my teaching and research within the discipline. Teaching introductory sociology became a formative practice: it required distilling complex ideas into their essential elements, learning how to make the discipline legible to new audiences, and, in the process, sharpening both my pedagogy and my research questions.
A visiting research year at the Center for Middle East Studies at Lund University provided the intellectual space to complete my first book, bringing together years of fieldwork and theoretical reflection. I then joined the Gender Studies Department at the London School of Economics, where I spent four years engaging deeply with critical gender and feminist theory, with a particular focus on how intersecting axes of gender and sexuality shape forms of governance, visibility, and belonging across different social and political contexts.
I am now based at the Simon Fraser University School for International Studies in Vancouver, where my work has increasingly engaged with questions of geopolitics and global power. Being part of a community of scholars who are not only academics but also public intellectuals and policy interlocutors has further shaped the outward-facing dimensions of my work—pushing it toward broader conversations beyond the academy while retaining its ethnographic and theoretical grounding. Vancouver itself, with its coastal openness and layered inequalities, offers an analytic vantage point from which questions of migration, settler colonial histories, and urban belonging come sharply into view.
Alongside my institutional affiliations, I serve on the Executive Committee of the International Sociological Association, where I contribute to ongoing conversations about the direction, responsibilities, and public role of sociology as a global discipline. This work—engaging questions of governance, representation, and the uneven geographies of knowledge production—extends my broader intellectual commitments into the institutional life of sociology itself.
Across these trajectories—from chemistry to journalism to sociology, from Tehran to Berkeley to Vancouver—my work remains anchored in a central concern: how power is lived and contested in everyday spaces, and how voices emerge, travel, and are reconfigured within uneven fields of visibility and recognition.
For a fuller account of my publications, teaching, and ongoing projects, please see my CV.
Dr Nazanin Shahrokni 