Bio

Maryam Alemzadeh holds a Ph.D in sociology from the University of Chicago and was the Harold Grinspoon Junior Research Fellow at the Crown Center for Middle East Studies at Brandeis University before joining Princeton. Her fields of interest include include comparative-historical sociology, state-building, revolutionary armies, social movements, and contemporary politics of Iran and the Middle East. She wrote her dissertation on the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps and post-revolutionary state building in Iran, from 1979 to 1982.

Maryam is currently working on her book manuscript, which addresses the formation of the IRGC as a state-sponsored, yet independent and spontaneous revolutionary militia. The book is based on firsthand research on the IRGC’s first generation of commanders, volunteers, political proponents, and critics, as they struggled to find order in chaos on a daily basis. Maryam's work revisits questions of continuity, change and institution building through the lens of everyday practices. Her research and policy papers have been published in the British Journal of Middle East Studies, Foreign Affairs and the Crown Center’s Middle East Brief series, among other places.

In September 2022 Maryam will join the Oxford School of Global and Area Studies and the Oxford Middle East Centre as Associate Professor of the History and Politics of Iran.