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Alireza Doostdar

Headshot of a man in a khaki green tshirt and glasses set against a tiled wall.
Contact

Phone773-702-8227

Emaildoostdar@uchicago.edu

LocationSwift 227

Areas of Study and Research

Anthropology and Sociology of Religion

Islamic Studies

Interests

Agency and Subjectivity

Anthropology

Class and Society

Colonial and Post Colonial Studies

Comparative Religion

Contemporary

Cultural Studies

Diaspora Communities

Ethics and Politics

Intellectual History

Islam

Magic and the Occult

Media Studies

Modern

Music

Mysticism

Near and Middle East

Philosophy

Political Theology

Visual Culture

Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies

Faculty Associate Professor of Islamic Studies and the Anthropology of Religion; also in the College

PhD (Harvard University)

Alireza Doostdar is broadly interested in religious reason and its entanglements with science and the state. His primary focus is on Shi‘i Islam, which he approaches as a dynamic tradition shaped in dialogue with other religious and secular formations. As a West Asia specialist, he has conducted most of his ethnographic and archival investigations in Iran, but he situates the phenomena he studies in relation to global circulations that take his research far beyond Iran’s national borders. His first book, The Iranian Metaphysicals: Explorations in Science, Islam, and the Uncanny (Princeton University Press, 2018) received the 2018 Albert Hourani Book Award from the Middle East Studies Association (MESA) and the 2020 Vinson Sutlive Book Prize from the Anthropology Department at William & Mary. His next book is a study of the theology of Satan in Iran since the Islamic Revolution.  

Doostdar is also involved in two collaborative research projects. With Ghenwa Hayek, he is co-producer and co-host of Gaming Islam, a video series about games and their relationship to Islam, Muslims, and the Middle East. In addition, he leads a research team compiling information and conducting oral history interviews to document Scholasticide in Gaza, Israel's systematic attacks on Palestinian education, the destruction of infrastructure, and the killing of faculty and students.   

Representative Publications