Ali Gheissari, PhD

Ali Gheissari has research interest in the intellectual history and politics of modern Iran and has published broadly in English and Persian on modern Iranian history and also on modern philosophy and social theory. His publications include Illuminationist Texts and Textual Studies: Essays in Memory of Hossein Ziai (co-eds., Brill, 2017); Contemporary Iran: Economy, Society, Politics (ed., Oxford University Press, 2009); Tabriz and Rasht in the Iranian Constitutional Revolution (ed., Tehran, 2008); Democracy in Iran: History and the Quest for Liberty (co-author, Oxford University Press, 2006; 2009); Iranian Intellectuals in the Twentieth Century (University of Texas Press, 1998; 2008); Persian translation of Immanuel Kant’s Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Ethics (with Hamid Enayat, Tehran, 1991; new edition, 2015); Manfred Frings et al., Max Scheler and Phenomenology (tr., Tehran, 2015); Kant on Time and Other Essays (authored, Tehran, 2018).

He is also the author of numerous essays, including “Poetry and Politics of Farrokhi Yazdi” (Iranian Studies, 26/1-2, 1993); “Truth and Method in Modern Iranian Historiography and Social Sciences” (Critique, 4/6, 1995); “Despots of the World Unite! Satire in the Iranian Constitutional Press” (Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East, 25/2, 2005); “Merchants without Borders: Trade, Travel, and a Revolution in late Qajar Iran” (in War and Peace in Qajar Persia, Routledge, 2008); “New Conservative Politics and Electoral Behavior in Iran” (co-author, in Contemporary Iran: Economy, Society, Politics, Oxford University Press, 2009); “Constitutional Rights and the Development of Civil Law in Iran, 1907-1941” (in Iran’s Constitutional Revolution: Politics, Cultural Transformations, and Transnational Connections, London, 2010); “The American College of Tehran, 1929-1931: A Memorial Album” (Iranian Studies 44/5, 2011); “The U.S. Coup of 1953 in Iran, Sixty Years On” (Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations Review: Passport 44/2, 2013); “Fruits of Gardens, by Ḥājj Mīrzā Muḥammad Tehrānī: An Unpublished Philosophical Miscellany in Arabic and Persian in late Qajar Iran (c. 1914)” (complete Persian sections, ed. with preface and notes, in Sayyed Ahmad Hosseini Ashkevarī Festschrift, Tehran, 2013); “Authorial Voices and the Sense of an Ending in Persian Diaries: Notes on Eʿtemād al-Saltaneh and ʿAlam” (Iranian Studies 49/4, 2016); “Iran’s Dialectic of Enlightenment: Constitutional Experience, Transregional Connections, and Conflicting Narratives of Modernity” (in Iran’s Constitutional Revolution of 1906 and Narratives of the Enlightenment, University of Chicago Press, Gingko Library, 2016); “Maqāle, Resāle, Ketāb: An Overview of Persian Expository and Analytical Prose,” in Ehsan Yarshater (Editor-in-Chief), A History of Persian Literature, Vol. V: Persian Prose, ed. Bo Utas (London, forthcoming).

He has held visiting appointments at the University of Tehran, the Iranian Institute of Philosophy, UCLA, Brown University, St. Antony’s College at the University of Oxford, and the Middle East Institute at the National University of Singapore. His current research focuses on legal and constitutional history of modern Iran. Professor Gheissari serves on the Board of Directors of the Persian Heritage Foundation (PHF), the Editorial Board of the Iran Studies series published by Brill (Leiden), and is also Editor-in-Chief of the journal Iranian Studies.

Gheissari has taught a wide range of graduate and undergraduate courses with comparative and interdisciplinary orientation, including Modern Middle East History; History of Modern Iran; War and Peace in the Modern World; Modern World History; and Topics in Modern European Intellectual History