In this episode, Belle interviews James Gustafson, Associate Professor of History at Indiana State University, about his new book, The Lion and the Sun: Environmental History and the Formation of Modern Iran (I.B. Tauris, 2025).
In The Lion and the Sun (and our podcast episode), Gustafson presents an overview of Iran’s environmental history from the Safavid Empire (1501-1722) to the rise of Reza Khan in the 1920s. Weaving together threads of local history alongside and within regional and global trajectories and environmental trends, he illustrates how the environment shaped histories of labor, revolution, and empire. He argues that the relationship between people and place that emerged in the 18th and 19th centuries shapes what we know as Iran today.
In this episode, Rustin interviews Dr. Aria Fani, Professor of Persian and Iranian Studies at the University of Washington, about his upcoming book project,...
In this episode, Belle interviews Dr. Pouya Alimagham, a Lecturer at MIT, and a Faculty Affiliate at the Harvard Kennedy School’s Middle East Initiative,...
In this episode, Lindsey and Ali interview Dr. Jyoti Gulati Balachandran, Assistant Professor of History at Penn State, about her book [Narrative Pasts: The...