About
Peyman Jafari is a historian of the intersections of energy, labor, and the environment in global capitalism, with a regional focus on the Middle East. He is Assistant Professor of History and International Relations at William & Mary (Virginia, U.S.A.) and a fellow at the International Institute of Social History (Amsterdam, N.L.). Prior to William & Mary, Jafari was a Postdoctoral Research Associate at Princeton University’s Sharmin and Bijan Mossavar-Rahmani Center for Iran and Persian Gulf Studies. He holds a PhD in history from Leiden University.
He is the author of multiple books, including Class Formation and Re-formation in the Iranian Oil Industry, 1908-1978 (forthcoming in 2025, in Persian), Het andere Iran: van de revolutie tot vandaag [The Other Iran: From the Revolution to the Present] (Ambo/Anthos, 2009, in Dutch), and Der andere Iran: Geschichte und Kultur von 1900 bis zur Gegenwart [The Other Iran: History and Culture from 1900 to the present] (C.H. Beck, 2010, in German). He also has co-edited two volumes: Worlds of Labor Turned Upside Down: Labor Relations and Revolutions in Global Perspective (Brill, 2021) and Iran in the Middle East: Transnational Encounters and Social History (I.B. Tauris, 2015).
His current book project examines the social history of oil during the highpoint of modernization in Iran in the 1970s, the 1979 revolution, and the Iran-Iraq War of 1980-88. His current research project, “Oil Frontiers in the British and Dutch Empires: Land, Labor, and Environment in the Making of an Imperial Oil Regime, 1890-1940,” is supported by a VENI-grant from the Dutch Scientific Council.
As a public-facing scholar, he regularly contributes to international media, bringing historical perspectives to current events in the Middle East. His interviews have appeared in English (The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, Aljazeera, NBC News, NPR), Dutch/Belgian (de Volkskrant, NRC, De Morgen, Nieuwsuur, Buitenhof, Eenvandaag, RTL, NOS Nieuws, Bureau Buitenland), and Persian (BBC Persian, VOA Persian, Radio Free Europe/RFL, Radio Zamaneh) media.