A citizen of both Iran and the United States, Dr Saeidi recently completed a post-doctoral fellowship at the Kate Hamburger Kolleg Centre for Global Cooperation Research in Duisburg, Germany. She holds a PhD in international studies from Cambridge University. She currently teaches politics at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia.
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. She is also one of the few, American researchers 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 in Tehran.
