For summer 2026, MERIP will be hosting a multi-part event series, Iran in Context, in collaboration with BRISMES and SeSaMO. This series will feature leading experts on Iran in conversation with MERIP's Executive Director, James Ryan, MERIP editorial committee member and BRISMES board member Sabiha Allouche, and SeSaMO Secretary Paola Rivetti.

The first event in this series features Manijeh Moradian (Barnard College) and Nazanin Shahrokni (Simon Fraser University) and will examine the role of women the gendered politics of the 1979 revolution in Iran, mapping changes and continuities up to the present. We will discuss the long-term consequences of the women's political mobilization in the 1970s, through the Iran-Iraq war, and beyond. For more information and to register, visit the BRISMES site below.

Manijeh Moradian is associate professor of Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies at Barnard College, Columbia University. Her book, This Flame Within: Iranian Revolutionaries in the United States (Duke University Press, 2022) won the 2024 Hamid Naficy Book Award for the best book in Iranian Diaspora Studies from the Association of Iranian Studies and the Center for Iranian Diaspora Studies. The book also received an Honorable Mention for the 2023 Middle East Studies Association Nikki Keddie Book Award. She has published widely including in American Quarterly, Meridians, Journal of Asian American Studies, Radical History Review, Scholar & Feminist online, jadaliyya.com and Meridians. She is a founding member of the Raha Iranian Feminist Collective and a member of Feminists for Jina, a global network which formed in fall 2022 to support the women, life, freedom uprising in Iran. 

Nazanin Shahrokni is a sociologist and Associate Professor in the School for International Studies at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, Canada. Her scholarship sits at the intersection of the global politics of gender, embodiment, mobility, state power, and transnational political formations, with a particular focus on Iran and the Middle East. She is the author of the award-winning Women in Place: The Politics of Gender Segregation in Iran (University of California Press, 2020), and has co-edited several scholarly volumes and special issues. Her scholarship has appeared in various public-facing venues including Middle East Report, Jadaliyya, Spectre Journal, and Truthout. Her 2024 article inHumanity Journal, “Depleted Households: Domesticating Economic Sanctions,” received Honorable Mention for the Arlene Kaplan Daniels Paper Award from the Society for the Study of Social Problems. She currently serves on the Executive Committee of the International Sociological Association, where she chairs the Statutes Committee.