Eskandar Sadeghi-Boroujerdi
Senior Lecturer in the History of the Middle East

Profile

Biography

DPhil (Oxon) FRHistS

Eskandar is a historian of the modern Middle East and North Africa, with a particular focus on the intellectual, cultural and political histories of twentieth-century Iran. He also has a longstanding interest in the modern social and political histories of Iran-Iraq relations from the late nineteenth-century to the present.

Prior to coming to the University of York, Eskandar taught and lectured at Goldsmiths, University of London, SOAS, University of London, Exeter, and Oxford and he was a British Academy Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of Oxford between 2016-2019.

His first monograph, Revolution and its Discontents: Political Thought and Reform in Iran, traced the political, intellectual and ideological genealogies of Iran’s post-revolutionary reform movement in the context of the global Cold War and Euro-American traditions of Cold War liberalism and was published by Cambridge University Press in 2019.

Eskandar has also extensively researched and published on the history of Iranian intellectuals, political militants and clandestine organisations during the 1960s and 1970s. This work has sought to situate modern Iran’s history within a larger global frame, highlighting in particular the sprawling transnational networks, relations and activities between lesser-known political organisations comprising part of the radical opposition to the Pahlavi regime, and likeminded movements across the Global South.

He co-edited, Political Parties in the Middle East (Routledge, 2019), which brings together chapters by a host of leading scholars on the history and politics of political parties in the modern Middle East. The volume set out to assess the historical significance and abiding relevance of political parties in the aftermath of the Arab Uprisings of 2011.

Eskandar recently edited and wrote an introduction for the new and expanded edition of the late Fred Halliday's Iran: Dictatorship and Development, first published in 1979. The introduction places Halliday's book in its proper historical context and examines Halliday's relationship to modern Iranian history and contemporary politics over the course of several decades, as well as in light of more recent scholarship on the Pahlavi era, drawing upon his papers and correspondence held at the LSE. The volume also brings together several of Halliday's essays and analyses published after the revolution in order to provide readers with a more comprehensive and well-rounded picture of Halliday's engagements with the Iranian Revolution of 1979 and its aftermath. 

Eskandar is currently working on two further monograph projects. The first builds upon several published articles focussing on the life and work of the Iranian intellectual, critic and dissident Jalal Al-e Ahmad (d. 1969) whose interventions and literary productions developed in parallel with, as well as prefigured postcolonial critiques of modernization, colonial modernity, and racial capitalism. The second more ambitious project explores the manifold histories and global interconnections of radical social and revolutionary movements since the mid-nineteenth century through to the present and is under contract with Verso Books. 

Research

Overview

Eskandar’s research interests include the history and contemporary politics of modern Iran, the modern intellectual history of Iran, political thought in the modern Middle East and North Africa, histories of decolonisation and the global Cold War, histories of revolutionary social movements in the modern Middle East, Islamist social movements and ideologies, global histories of socialism and Marxism, as well as postcolonial and decolonial theory.

Publications

Full publications list

Monographs

• Eskandar Sadeghi-Boroujerdi, Revolution and its Discontents: Political Thought and Reform in Iran (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2019), pp. 456.

Peer Reviewed Journal Articles

• Eskandar Sadeghi-Boroujerdi, Al-e Ahmad’s Faustian Bargain?: Antonio Gramsci, the “Progressive Clergy” and the Search for Hegemony in Late Pahlavi Iran, South Atlantic Quarterly (Duke University Press), forthcoming.

• Eskandar Sadeghi-Boroujerdi, Iran’s Uprisings for “Women, Life, Freedom”: Overdetermination, Crisis, and the Lineages of Revolt, Politics (SAGE), Vol. 43(3), 2023, pp. 404–438.

• Eskandar Sadeghi-Boroujerdi, Shariʿati, Anti-Capitalism, and the Promise of the “Third World”, Philosophy and Global Affairs, Vol. 2, Issue 1, 2022, pp. 197-211.

• Eskandar Sadeghi-Boroujerdi and Yaacov Yadgar, Al-e Ahmad, Guardianship, and the Critique of Colonial Sovereignty, Constellations: An International Journal of Critical and Democratic Theory (Wiley-Blackwell), Volume 29, Issue 1, March 2022, pp. 19-33.

• Eskandar Sadeghi-Boroujerdi, Iran and the Permanence of the Theologico-Political?, Political Theology, 4 July 2022. 

• Eskandar Sadeghi-Boroujerdi, Gharbzadegi, Colonial Capitalism and the Racial State in Iran, Postcolonial Studies, 24:2, 2021., pp. 173-194. 

• Eskandar Sadeghi-Boroujerdi and Yaacov Yadgar, Jalal’s Angels of Deliverance and Destruction: Genealogies of Theo-politics, Sovereignty and Coloniality in Iran and Israel, Modern Intellectual History (Cambridge University Press), Volume 18, Issue 1, March 2021, pp. 223-247. 

• Eskandar Sadeghi-Boroujerdi, The Origins of Communist Unity: Anti-Colonialism and Revolution in Iran’s Tri-continental Moment, British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies, Vol. 45, Issue 5, 2018., pp 796-822.

• Eskandar Sadeghi-Boroujerdi, Mostafa Malekian: Spirituality, Siyasat-Zadegi and (A)political Self-Improvement, Digest of Middle East Studies (Wiley), Volume 23, Number 2, 2014., pp. 279–311.

• Eskandar Sadeghi-Boroujerdi, From Etelaʿati to Eslahtalabi: Saʿid Hajjarian, Political Theology and the Politics of Reform in Post-Revolutionary Iran, Iranian Studies, Vol. 47, No. 6, 2014., pp. 987-1009.

Edited Books

• Fred Halliday, Iran: Dictatorship and Development, new expanded edition, edited and introduced by Eskandar Sadeghi-Boroujerdi (London: Oneworld, 2024).

• Siavush Randjbar-Daemi, Eskandar Sadeghi-Boroujerdi & Lauren Banko (eds.), Political Parties in the Middle East (London and New York: Routledge, 2019).

Commissioned Book Chapters 

• Eskandar Sadeghi-Boroujerdi and Nasser Mohajer, Translation, Revolutionary Praxis, and the Enigma of Manuchehr Hezarkhani, in Rasmus C. Elling and Sune Haugbølle, eds. The Fate of Third Worldism in the Middle East: Iran, Palestine and Beyond (London and New York: Oneworld Publications, 2024). 

• Eskandar Sadeghi-Boroujerdi, Strategic Depth, Counterinsurgency & the Logic of Sectarianization: Perspectives on the Islamic Republic of Iran’s Security Doctrine and Its Regional Implications, Eskandar Sadeghi-Boroujerdi, in Sectarianization: Mapping the New Politics of the Middle East, (eds.) Nader Hashemi and Danny Postel (Oxford & New York: Oxford University Press, 2017).

Special Issues of Academic Journals

• Siavush Randjbar-Daemi, Eskandar Sadeghi-Boroujerdi & Lauren Banko (eds.), Political Parties in the Middle East: Historical Trajectories and Future Prospects, British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies, Vol. 44, Issue 2, 2017.

Online Articles

• Eskandar Sadeghi-Boroujerdi, Who Translated Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth into Persian?, Jadaliyya, 13 August 2020.

• Eskandar Sadeghi-Boroujerdi and Siavush Randjbar-Daemi, Musaddiq's Spectre: On the Recent Declassification of US Documents, Jadaliyya, 17 July 2017.

• Eskandar Sadeghi-Boroujerdi, Scholarship in the Service of Empire: The Legacy of Ann K.S. Lambton in 20th Century Iran, Ajam Media Collective, 6 March 2017. 

• Eskandar Sadeghi-Boroujerdi & Siavush Randjbar-Daemi, Serving the Leviathan: The Life and Legacy of Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, Jacobin, 18 January 2017.

Translations

• Eskandar Sadeghi-Boroujerdi, “Some of the Vanguard of the Return to Self in the Third World” by Ali Shariʿati, in Spirit and Defiance: Ali Shariati in Translation, (eds.) Siavash Saffari, Arash Davari and Maryam Rabiee (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, fortcoming). 

• Heydar Tabrizi, The Foreign Relations of the Organisation of Iranian People’s Fadaʿi Guerrillas: From Its Formation until the Iranian Revolution of 1979, translated by Eskandar Sadeghi-Boroujerdi, Fada'i Guerrilla Praxis in Iran, 1970 - 1979: Narratives and Reflections on Everyday Life, (eds.) Touraj Atabaki, Nasser Mohajer, and Siavush Randjbar-Daemi (London and New York: Bloomsbury, 2024).

• The Post-Revolutionary Women’s Uprising of March 1979: An Interview with Nasser Mohajer and Mahnaz Matin, translated, edited and introduced by Eskandar Sadeghi-Boroujerdi, Iran Wire, June 2013.

Teaching

Undergraduate

An example of modules taught:

• HIS00125I Historical Thinking
• HIS00169I Decolonisation and Social Revolution in the Modern Middle East and North Africa, 1945 to the present

Postgraduate

An example of modules taught:

• HIS00173M Messiahs, Mojaheds, and Marxists: Social Protest, Resistance, and Revolution in Modern Iran
• HIS00053M Making the Contemporary World: History, Politics and Ideas since 1945

External activities

Overview

Eskandar is a fellow of the Royal Historical Society and series editor of Radical Histories of the Middle East (Oneworld Publications). He also previously served as an associate editor at the British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies and Politics.