Research Seminar: Alvandi on Iran in the Age of Aryamehr
Roham Alvandi, Professor of International History at the London School of Economics and Political Science, gave a talk on October 15, 2018 as part of the Research Seminar Series at the Frederick S. Pardee School of Global Studies at Boston University.
As part of the Research Seminar Series, Alvandi gave a talk entitled “Iran in the Age of Aryamehr: Late Pahlavi Iran and its Global Entanglements,” which focused on his forthcoming book, The Age of Aryamehr: Late Pahlavi Iran and its Global Entanglements (Gingko Library, November 2018). Pardee School Professor of International Relations and History Houchang E. Chehabi, who contributed two chapters to the book, introduced Alvandi.
The book, which Alvandi edited and wrote the introduction to, explores the reign of the last Shah of Iran, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, which marked the high-point of Iran’s global interconnectedness. It is further concerned with Iran’s place in the global history of the 1960s and 1970s and examines the transnational threads that connected Pahlavi Iran to the world, from global traffic in modern art and narcotics, to the embrace of American social science by Iranian technocrats and the encounter of European intellectuals with the Iranian Revolution. In doing so, it seeks to write Pahlavi Iran into the global history of the 1960s and 1970s, when Iran mattered far beyond its borders.
Alvandi is a historian of Iran and the modern Middle East. He is the author of Nixon, Kissinger, and the Shah: The United States and Iran in the Cold War (Oxford University Press, 2014), in which he examines the rise and fall of Iran’s Cold War partnership with the United States in the 1970s.
He has written extensively on the history of Iran’s foreign relations and is currently working on a second book, Iran’s Cold War, an international history of Iran’s role in the global struggle between the capitalist West and communist East from the 1940s to the 1980s. His work has appeared in the British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies, Cold War History, Diplomatic History, and Iranian Studies.
The Pardee School Research Seminar Series is a forum for faculty and students to discuss and receive feedback on ongoing research. The series is a mix of presentations, works-in-progress sessions, and research workshops. Faculty and students based at BU and elsewhere are invited to present and attend the Research Seminar Series. Anyone interested in presenting should send an e-mail with name, affiliation, and a presentation description, with “Pardee Seminar” in the subject line, to: Mahesh Karra.