Nayereh Tohidi
Nayereh Tohidi () is professor and former chair at the Department of Gender & Women Studies, California State University, Northridge. She is also a research associate at the Center for Near Eastern Studies of UCLA, where she has been coordinating the Bilingual Lecture Series on Iran since 2003. Her teaching and research areas include sociology of gender, religion (Islam), ethnicity and democracy in the Middle East and post-Soviet Central Eurasia, especially Iran and Azerbaijan. She is the recipient of several grants, fellowships and research awards, including a year of Fulbright lectureship and research at the Academy of Sciences of  the Soviet Republic of Azerbaijan; post-doctoral fellowships at Harvard University; the Hoover Institute of Stanford University; the Kennan Institute of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars; and the Keddie-Balzan Fellowship at the Center for Near Eastern Studies at UCLA. She has held visiting positions at Universities of Iowa, Minnesota, Harvard, UCLA, and USC. Recently she has been awarded a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities to develop and launch a minor in Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies in California State University, Northridge. Tohidi's publications include editorship or authorship of "Globalization, Gender and Religion: The  Politics of Women’s Rights in Catholic and Muslim Contexts"; "Women in Muslim Societies: Diversity within Unity"; and "Feminism, Democracy and Islamism in Iran". Areas of specialization. Gender, Islam, Feminism, Modernity and Democracy; Ethnicity and Ethno-Religious Movements; Human/Women Rights in the Persianate and Turkic Societies of the Middle East, the Caucasus and Central Asia