Research Associate
Research Summary
Dr. Fatemeh Sadeghi is a political scientist specializing in political thought and gender studies. She is an Research Associate and academic facilitator at TAKHAYYUL, an ERC-funded project at the Institute for Global Prosperity, headed by Dr. Sertaç Sehlikoglu. She is also the deputy editor of the Manchester Journal of Transnational Islamic Law and Practice.
Fatemeh’s research is on political imagination (takhayyul-e siyasi تخیل سیاسی) as a collective constellation inspired by political, theological, philosophical, and historical forces and traditions aiming at envisioning a different future and making it possible. Focusing on Islam and contemporary Iran, she studies political constellations that allow individuals and groups to define their aspirations by remaking and redefining collective fantasies. She studies the intersubjective and socially constructed mentalities aspire to a different future in a creative and cognitive process typically concerned with what is unreal, unknowable, hypothetical, or yet-to-be.
She has also researched gender and power in today's Iran, gender in ethical thoughts in the early Islamic era, gender in Zoroastrianism, and gendered nationalism. Her research includes the Iranian revolution, the unveiling campaign of the first Pahlavi Iran and the compulsory hijab of the Islamic Republic.
In recent years, she has been studying constitutional theory and its relation to sovereignty in post-revolutionary Iran. This research will be published as a book in Persian and a few articles in English.
She is currently working on a book manuscript titled Politics in Unusual Time: Redemptive Aspirations in Today’s Iran. The book will be published by Syracuse University Press.
Apart from research she provides mentorship to junior scholars and supervises post graduate students' theses related to gender and politics. As a guest lecturer she has been invited to teach courses on global feminism and women’s movement in Iran at Vassar College. Fatemeh was also invited to several public talks on politics, religion, and women’s movement in Iran.
Some of her recent publications in English and Farsi include:
“God as Sovereign; Sovereign as God: An Archeology of the Iranian Constitution of 1979”, in Khalid Masood and Hana Jalloul Muro (eds.), Sharia in 21st Century: Islamic Law and its Impact on Global Geopolitics, Economics and Society, World Scientific Publishing, 2022.
“Post-Islamism: From Making Islam Democratic to the Politics of Myth”, Manchester Journal of Transnational Islamic Law and Practice, 18 (1), pp. 3-18, 2021.
“Iran’s Islamic Revolution: The Return of the Hunchbacked Dwarf”, in Armando Salvatore et al (eds.), Oxford Handbook of the Sociology of the Middle East, Oxford University Press, 2020.
The Sin of the Woman, Interrelations of Religious Judgments in Zoroastrianism and Islam was published by Klaus Schwartz Verlag, Berlin, 2018.
Dar Hokm-e Qanun: Ganun-e Asasiye Jomhuriy-e Eslami-e Iran (As a Canon: Sovereignty and Law in The Constitution of the Islamic Republic of Iran) (Tehran: Negah-e Moaser, forthcoming.)
Gender in Ethical Doctrines from 3 to 9th Century Iran (Tehran: Nagah-e Moaser Publication, Second Edition 2016).
Unveiling: Re-reading of a Modern Intervention, (Tehran: Nagah-e Moaser Publication, 2013).
Gender, Nationalism, and Modernity in the First Pahlavi Iran (Tehran: Qasideh Saraa, Second Edition 2013).
She has also translated a number of books from English into Persian including Asef Bayat’s Life as Politics: How Ordinary People Change the Middle East, Leila Ahmed’s Women and Gender in Islam: Historical Roots of the Modern Debate, Betty Friedan’s Feminine Mystique, Agnes Heller’s A Theory of Modernity and Reza Aslan’s Zealot: The Life and Time of Jesus of Nazareth.
Further information on Fatemeh’s research and publications can be found at:
https://ucl.academia.edu/FatemehSadeghi
https://scholar.google.ca/citations?user=VsVIaxwAAAAJ&hl=en
https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Fatemeh-Sadeghi-13
https://iris.ucl.ac.uk/iris/browse/profile?upi=FSADE27