Dr Shirin Saeidi

A citizen of both Iran and the United States, Dr Saeidi recently completed a post-doctoral fellowship at the Kate Hamburger Kolleg Center for Global Cooperation Research in Duisburg, Germany. She holds a PhD in international studies from Cambridge University, UK. Her research interests focus on several interrelated fields of study: the politics of state formation; citizenship; Iranian nationalism and state-building. Dr Saeidi's research is interdisciplinary, and revolves around her desire to understand how people's agency at the local level influences national and transnational politics in the Middle East. She is particularly interested in the political ramifications of citizenship structures in non-democratic settings. Saeidi is fluent in Farsi and spent 2012 to nearly 2015, carrying out fieldwork for several research projects in Iran. She is also one of the few, if not only, American researcher to have been based at the University of Tehran for several years. Dr Saeidi's current project is based on several years of ethnographic research at Hizbollah cultural institutes inTehran. She examines how pro-regime Hizbollah activists in post-2009 Iran think about sovereignty through an analysis of the cultural artifacts that they are producing. She teaches politics at George Mason University in Fairfax VA, where she lives with her family.