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Daniella Farah

MA, Islamic and Near Eastern Studies, magna cum laude, Washington University in St. Louis, 2013
BA, International Studies, University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign, 2010

I am a PhD candidate in Jewish History, specializing in the sociocultural histories of the Jews of the modern Middle East, with a specific geographic focus on Iran and Turkey. My work is situated at the intersection of Jewish history, Middle Eastern history, education history, and transnationalism studies. My broader research and teaching interests include Modern Jewish history, Mizrahi and Sephardi Studies, Iranian and Turkish history, religious and ethnic minorities in the Middle East, the history of education, Jewish-Muslim relations, and Jewish philanthropies. I am the recipient of the 2021 Salon Baron New Voices in Jewish Studies Award at Columbia and Fordham Universities, which honors the work of emerging scholars in the field of Jewish Studies. 

In my doctoral dissertation, which employs an extensive range of archival and printed materials, as well as oral histories in Persian, Judeo-Persian, Hebrew, French and English, I examine how Jews in twentieth-century Iran constructed complex identities vis-à-vis the burgeoning nation-state. Focusing on the themes of education, the Jewish press, and national belonging in the period from the early 1940s to the early 1980s, I demonstrate how Jews integrated into the broader non-Jewish Iranian polity and made claims of belonging to the state. 

In addition to my research efforts, I am committed to teaching and pedagogy. In the 2013-2014 school year I served as a Fulbright English Teaching Assistant at Çanakkale Onsekiz Mart University in Turkey. For the 2015-2016 academic year I was awarded the History Department's "Excellence in First Time Teaching Award" and as a recipient of Stanford's Collaborative Teaching Project Grant, I co-taught a course with Professors Steven Zipperstein and Joel Beinin in winter 2017. In spring 2017 I taught a self-designed course, "Between Toleration and Persecution: Iran and its Minorities in the Twentieth Century" and in spring 2021 I will teach another self-designed course titled, "Jews of the Modern Middle East and North Africa." 

 

 

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