Nayereh Esfahlani Tohidi (born 1951) is an Iranian-born American professor, researcher, and academic administrator. Tohidi is a professor emerita and former chair of gender and women’s studies, and the founding director of the Middle Eastern and Islamic studies (from 2011 to 2021) at California State University, Northridge. She is also a research associate at the Center for Near Eastern Studies of University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), where she had coordinated the Bilingual Lecture Series on Iran since 2003. She specializes in the fields of gender, Islam, feminism, modernity, and democracy; ethnicity and ethno-religious movements; and human and women's rights in the Persianate and Turkic Societies of the Middle East, the Caucasus and Central Asia.

Career

Her teaching and research areas include sociology of gender, religion (Islam), ethnicity and democracy in the Middle East and post-Soviet Central Eurasia, especially Iran and Azerbaijan. She is the recipient of several grants, fellowships and research awards, including a year of Fulbright lectureship and research at the Academy of Sciences of the Soviet Republic of Azerbaijan; post-doctoral fellowships at Harvard University; the Hoover Institute of Stanford University; the Kennan Institute of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars; and the Keddie-Balzan Fellowship at the Center for Near Eastern Studies at UCLA. She has held visiting positions at the University of Iowa, the University of Minnesota, Harvard University, University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), and the University of Southern California (USC). In 2015, she was awarded a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities to develop and launch a minor in Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies in California State University, Northridge. Tohidi's publications include editorship or authorship of Globalization, Gender and Religion: The Politics of Women’s Rights in Catholic and Muslim Contexts; Women in Muslim Societies: Diversity within Unity; and Feminism, Democracy and Islamism in Iran. Her work has appeared in Ms. magazine.

Education

Publications

Books

Selected articles