Biography
Nayereh Tohidi is a Professor Emerita and former Chair of Gender & Women’s Studies and the Founding Director of the Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies (2011-2021) at California State University, Northridge. She is also a Research Associate in the Program of Iranian Studies at UCLA coordinating “Bilingual Lecture Series on Iran” since 2003. She received her MA and Ph.D. from the Universities of Tehran and Illinois in Champaign-Urbana. She is also the recipient of several post-doctoral fellowships and research awards, including an NEH grant, a year of Fulbright lectureship and research at the Academy of Sciences of the Soviet Republic of Azerbaijan; universities of Harvard and Stanford, the Kennan Institute of the Woodrow Wilson Center, and Keddie-Balzan Fellowship at UCLA. Her teaching and research expertise include gender and development; women’s movements and feminism; women and Islam; globalization, ethnicity, and nationalism in the Caucasus and MENA. Her extensive publications include editorship or authorship of three books and numerous articles and interviews in peer-reviewed academic and policy-oriented journals. Some of Tohidi’s articles have been published in different languages, including English, Persian, Turkic, Russian, Spanish, German, Arabic and Japanese. She has served on the editorial boards of academic journals such as the Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion, the Journal of Azadi Andisheh, and the International Journal of Humanities and Social Development Research. Prof. Tohidi has integrated academic excellence with transnational human/women’s rights activism. She represented women NGOs at the UN-sponsored third and fourth World Conferences on Women in Nairobi and Beijing. She has also served as a consultant for the UN agencies (UNICEF and UNDP) on issues concerning children and women’s status in the Caucasus and Middle East. Dr. Tohidi has also joined the faculty board of Iran Academia of the Institute for Social Sciences since 2015.