WGS Intellectual Forum
Pouya Alimagham, MIT History
The Limits of Empowerment: Women, Gender, and Revolution in Iran’s Green Uprising
Wed 9/25 at noon in 14E-304
RSVP to wgs@mit.edu so we have a count for lunch.

Pouya Alimagham is a lecturer at MIT's history department. His work focuses on revolutionary movements, sectarianism, political Islam and post-Islamism. His dissertation, Contesting the Iranian Revolution: The Green Uprisings, is being publishing with Cambridge University Press this January. In the study, he de-centers the leadership of the movement in favor of a bottom-up, "history from below" approach by focusing on the women and men who were the central agents of that history. By centering them, his work underscores the post-Islamist paradigm shift taking place in Iran today.

 He completed his PhD in history at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. He holds an MA in Middle Eastern Studies from Harvard University, and a BA in Political Science and Middle Eastern Studies from UC Berkeley. At MIT, he teaches history courses on the early Islamic period, the modern Middle East, and co-teaches 21H.001 "How to Stage a Revolution." Last fall, he also instituted for the first time a "Modern Iran: A Century of Revolution." He received the Levitan Teaching Award in the spring of 2019.

The Limits of Empowerment: Women, Gender, and Revolution in Iran’s Green Uprising:
This presentation explores the role of women in the Green Uprising in Iran in 2009 and how their widespread involvement brought to the fore some of the contradictions in the Islamic Republic of Iran. From the speeches of the main opposition candidates wife, Dr. Zahra Rahnavard, and the "postergirl" of the uprising, Neda Agha Soltan, to the never-ending debate over the mandated veiling of women, their presence and leadership during the uprising highlights the limits of their state-sponsored empowerment,​ and their struggle for more.