Mojtaba Mahdavi
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- Mojtaba Mahdavi is Professor of Political Science and the ECMC Chair in Islamic Studies at the University of Alberta. He is the author and editor of numerous works on post-Islamism, contemporary social movements and democratization in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA), postrevolutionary Iran, and modern Islamic political thought. He is the editor of The Myth of Middle East Exceptionalism: Unfinished Social Movements (Syracuse University Press, 2023); co-editor of Rethinking China, the Middle East and Asia in a “Multiplex World” (Brill 2022); and co-editor of Towards the Dignity of Difference: Neither ‘End of History’ nor ‘Clash of Civilizations’ (Routledge 2012). He has also served as guest editor of The Many Faces of Contemporary Post-Islamism (special issue of Religions, 2021) and Contemporary Social Movements in the Middle East and Beyond (special issue of Sociology of Islam, 2014). Dr. Mahdavi is currently working on the following book projects: Ali Shariati and Beyond: Imagining Ethical Democratic Socialism in Muslim Contexts; Towards a Progressive Post-Islamism: Neo-Shariati Discourse in Postrevolutionary Iran; and Iran: Is a post-Islamist Democracy Possible?
- He has received numerous awards and grants, including the Fulbright Canada Visiting Scholar Award at Princeton University, the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) Connection Grant, the SSHRC Conference Fund, the IDRC Canada Partnership Grant, the Killam Research Operating Grant, and the Visiting Fellowship at the Liu Institute and Green College at the University of British Columbia, among others.
- Dr. Mahdavi’s research lies at the intersection of Critical Middle East Studies, Political Economy, Contemporary Islamic Studies, and Decolonial/Postcolonial Studies. His work is primarily driven by an interest in the socio-structural transformations shaping the lives of ordinary people and the discursive and intellectual shifts within MENA and broader Muslim contexts. He welcomes supervising graduate students pursuing research on the critical study of social movements, state–society relations, religion and politics, and the political economy of the MENA region; alternative modernities and democracies in Muslim-majority societies; critical postcolonial studies; and contemporary Islamic/Muslim studies.