Dr. Nayereh Tohidi

Professor & Chair

Women's Studies Department
California State University, Northridge
Close up of Dr. Nayereh Tohidi

 

Nayereh Tohidi is Professor and Chair of the Women’s Studies Department at California State University, Northridge and a Research Associate at the Center for Near Eastern Studies at UCLA where she has been coordinating the Persian Lecture Series on Iran for the past three years. Tohidi earned her MA and Ph.D. from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and a BS (with Honors) from the University of Tehran in Psychology and Sociology. Her teaching and research areas include sociology of gender, religion and democracy in the Middle East and post-Soviet Central Eurasia, especially Iran and Azerbaijan Republic. 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; the Hoover Institute of Stanford University; the Kennan Institute of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars; and the Keddie-Balzan Fellowship at the Center for Near Eastern Studies at UCLA. She has taught at Universities of Iowa, Minnesota, Harvard, USC and UCLA.

 

Dr. Tohidi has been a consultant for the United Nations (UNDP, UNICEF, ILO, and WIDER) on projects concerning gender and development, and women and civil society building in the Middle East and post-Soviet Eurasia. She represented women NGOs at both the third and fourth World Conferences on Women in Nairobi (NGO Forum 1985) and Beijing (NGO Forum 1995) on gender issues in Iran and the post-Soviet Caucasus and Central Asia.

 

Professor Tohidi has integrated her human rights activism and community organizing with excellence in academic work and scholarship. She is frequently consulted by the media and invited to speak on women and gender issues, democracy and human rights in Islamic societies at community events and national and international conferences. In 2001, she ran a weekly radio program on “Women and Society in Iran” broadcast to Iran, Central Asia, and Europe through Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty. Some of her writings and interviews have been translated and/or reprinted in other languages and in different countries, including Iran, Russia, France, Austria, Azerbaijan, Tajikistan, Afghanistan, Britain, Spain, India, Japan, Lebanon, and Brazil.

 

Tohidi’s recent publications include editorship or authorship of:

 

  • Globalization, Gender and Religion: The Politics of Women’s Rights in Catholic and Muslim Contexts (co-edited and contributed with Jane Bayes) (Palgrave, 2001);
  • Women in Muslim Societies: Diversity within Unity (co-edited and contributed with Herbert Bodman) (Lynne Rienner, 1998);
  • Feminism, Democracy and Islamism in Iran (single authored) (Ketabsara, Los Angeles, 1996, reprinted in Iran, 1998);
  • “Women, Building Civil Society, and Democratization in Post-Soviet Azerbaijan,” in Post-Soviet Women Encountering Transition, edited by Kathleen Kuehnast and Carol Nechemias, Washington, D.C.: Woodrow Wilson Center Press and the John Hopkins University Press, 2004.
  • “Islamic Feminism: Perils and Promises,” in the Middle East Women’s Studies Review, Vol. 16, No. 3&4, Fall 2001/Winter 2002, Pp. 13–15 & 27, which can be accessed at: http://www.amews.org/review/reviewarticles/tohidi.htm
  • “No to Forced Veiling and No to Forced Unveiling: An Analysis of the French Law Banning the Headscarf,” in the Iranian Feminists Tribune, http://www.iftribune.com/news.asp?id=5&pass=17, December 31, 2003. [Reprinted in Iran-Emrooz, Women in Iran and a few other Internet journals].
  • “Women, Democratization and Islam in Post-Soviet Azerbaijan,” Policy Papers Series (Kennan Institute of the Woodrow Wilson Center, 2002);
  • “The Global-Local Intersection of Feminism in Muslim Societies: The Cases of Iran and Azerbaijan” in the Journal of Social Research, 69:3, Fall 2002;
  • “Women’s Rights in the Muslim World: The Universal-Particular Interplay” in the Hawwa Journal on Women in the Middle East and Islamic World, 1:2, 2003;
  • “The International Connections of the Women’s Movement in Iran: 1979–2000” in Iran and the Surrounding World: Interaction in Culture and Cultural Politics, edited by Nikki Keddie and Rudi Matthee (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2002): 205–231.
  • "Soviet in Public, Azeri in Private: Gender, Islam and National Identity in Soviet and Post-Soviet Azerbaijan," in Women's Studies International Forum, 19 (1&2), 1996.
  • "Immigrant Iranians and Gender Relations in Los Angeles," in Irangeles: Iranians in Los Angeles edited by Ron Kelly, et al. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993).

 

For more information on Tohidi’s work, check:

http://www.csun.edu/ws/Faculty-Webpage_Tohidi.htm

 

     

 

Dr. Tohidi's Spring 2007 classes