Eskandar Sadeghi-Boroujerdi
Senior Lecturer in the History of the Middle East
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Profile
Biography
DPhil (Oxon) FRHistS
Eskandar is an interdisciplinary scholar of the Middle East, working at the intersections of international political theory, intellectual and political history, postcolonial theory, and international relations. His research explores the global entanglements of revolutionary movements, with particular attention to the modern history of Iran and the wider Shi'i Muslim world. He works extensively on theories and practices of decolonisation, examining how anti-colonial and postcolonial thought have shaped political ideologies, movements, and state practices across the Global South.
He has written on the foreign policy of the Islamic Republic of Iran, situating it within the broader context of revolutionary statecraft, ideological formation, and international political theory. His work explores how revolutionary and religious ideologies influence Iran’s international relations, and how these intersect with regional and global dynamics of civil war, popular mobilisation and ideological contestation.
Before joining the University of York, Eskandar was a Lecturer in the Contemporary Politics and Modern History of the Middle East at Goldsmiths, University of London. He has previously taught and lectured at the University of Exeter, the University of Oxford, and was a British Academy Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of Oxford from 2016 to 2019.
His first monograph, Revolution and its Discontents: Political Thought and Reform in Iran, examines the political, intellectual, and ideological genealogies of Iran’s post-revolutionary reform movement within the context of the global Cold War and Euro-American traditions of Cold War liberalism. It was published by Cambridge University Press in 2019.
Eskandar has also researched and published extensively on the history of Iranian intellectuals, political militants, and clandestine organisations in the 1960s and 1970s. His work on “Third Worldism” situates Iran’s revolutionary history within broader anti-colonial and internationalist movements, tracing the networks, solidarities, and intellectual exchanges between Iranian opposition groups and likeminded revolutionary movements across the Global South.
He is the co-editor of Political Parties in the Middle East (Routledge, 2019), and the editor of a newly expanded edition of Fred Halliday’s Iran: Dictatorship and Development (Oneworld, 2024), for which he wrote an article-length introduction.
Eskandar is currently engaged in a number of research projects spanning modern Iranian intellectual history, international political thought, and postcolonial theory. One project offers an in-depth study of the influential Iranian thinker and dissident Jalal Al-e Ahmad (d. 1969), situating his work within broader currents of global intellectual history. He is also investigating the history of internationalism and the strategies through which states and movements in the Global South have sought to mobilise international and multilateral institutions to reshape the global order and advance their political and economic interests. His research further explores the history and practice of diplomacy in the Islamic Republic of Iran, alongside a wider interest in the diplomatic cultures of revolutionary states. This research traces the global circulation of revolutionary ideas and critical practices and explores the complex relationships between ideology, state-building, and foreign policy in the postcolonial and post-revolutionary world.
Departmental roles
Current PhD Students:
- Kimia Talebi. PhD project: "The political imaginaries and activism of Middle Eastern migrants in Britain during the Long Sixties"
Contact details
Student hours