The Iran Social Science Data Portal is an English- and Persian-language internet portal that hosts social science data on Iran; including socioeconomic data, electoral data, information on political parties, and translations of selected laws. It aims to provide a service to journalists, academics, policymakers, and others interested in analyzing political and socioeconomic developments in contemporary Iran. The project has been funded by the Social Science Research Council, Princeton University and Syracuse University.
Who are we?
Principal Investigators
Mehrzad Boroujerdi is Vice Provost and Dean of College of Arts, Sciences and Education at Missouri University of Science and Technology. He is the author of Iranian Intellectuals and the West: The Tormented Triumph of Nativism (1996), I Carved, Worshiped and Shattered: Essays on Iranian Politics and Identity [in Persian] (2010), and Postrevolutionary Iran: A Political Handbook (Syracuse University Press, 2018). In addition, he is the author of numerous journal articles and book chapters in English and Persian and edited Mirror for the Muslim Prince: Islam and Theory of Statecraft (2013). Dr. Boroujerdi has been a Fellow of the American Council on Education, a postdoctoral Fellow at Harvard University, a Rockefeller Foundation Fellow at the University of Texas at Austin, and a visiting scholar at UCLA’s Center for Near Eastern Studies. Dr. Boroujerdi has also been a professor of political science at Syracuse University (1992-2019), non-resident Scholar at the Middle East Institute in Washington, D.C (2005-2016), President of the Association for Iranian Studies (2012-2014), and Director of the School of Public and International Affairs at Virginia Tech (2019-2022).
Research and Project Assistants
The following individuals have worked as assistants for IDP in the past:
Arash Pourebrahimi is a visiting fellow at Harvard University and a PhD candidate in Political Economy at Leiden University (Netherlands). He also works as a research associate at the Institute for Quantitative Social Science at Harvard. His research interests include International Political Economy, Formal and Quantitative Methodology, Collective Decision-Making in Political Institutions and Politics in the Middle East. His current research projects focus on Legislative Decision-Making in the European Union and Voter turnout in Iranian elections. For more information, see http://www.iq.harvard.edu/people/arash-pourebrahimi.
Artin Afkhami is an Iran Researcher at The New York Times and a graduate student at the Fletcher School of Law & Diplomacy at Tufts University. He also teaches Persian at the Middle East Institute in Washington, DC. Previously, he served as a Foreign Affairs intern for the Office of Senator Dianne Feinstein (CA). He holds a BA in Middle East Studies with High Honors from UC Berkeley. His interests include US grand strategy, Middle East politics, and political philosophy.
Mohammad Ali Kadivar is a PhD Candidate of Sociology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He has received his BA and MA from University of Tehran. His interests include political sociology, social movements, democratization, Middle East, and Iranian politics. Mohammad Ali’s current research is about the Iranian Reform Movement (1997-2005).
Peyman Malaz is a PhD student of International Relation and Islamic Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles. Peyman holds a BA in Political Science from the University of California, Irvine. His general areas of interest include religion and ethics in international affairs, social movements in world politics, political sociology and international security.
Katie Manbachi graduated with an M.A. from the Department of Near Eastern Studies at Princeton University in June 2013. Her research interests include Islamic political thought in modern Iran, specifically conservative discourses, female religious authority, and institutions of religious education in Iran. Her M.A. thesis analyzed the evolution of the late Ayatollah Montazeri’s doctrine of velāyat-e faqih (Guardianship of the Jurist) in his scholarly works Mabāni-ye Feqh-e Hokumat-e Eslāmi and Hokumat-e Dini va Hoquq-e Ensān.
Maryam Rutner is a PhD student in Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies at New York University, and research assistant at the Department of Near Eastern Studies at Princeton University. She holds a master’s degree in International Affairs from the School of International and Public Affairs at Columbia University, and a master’s degree in Political Science and Iranian Studies from Georg-August University (Germany). Maryam’s interests include Islamic law, religious authorities, and the relationship between the state and religion.
Elham Seyedsayamdost is a PhD Candidate in Political Science at Columbia University focusing on comparative politics and political economy of development. Prior to her doctoral studies, Elham worked at the United Nations and the World Bank on development projects dealing with poverty reduction, gender and economy, health, and education. Elham holds a BA in International and Comparative Politics from the American University of Paris, and a Master of International Affairs and an MA in Political Science from Columbia University.
Evan Siegel is an amateur researcher focusing on Iran during the Constitutional Period. His translations include Ahmad Kasravi’s History of the Iranian Constitutional Revolution. He has presented and published dozens of articles and translations based on Persian, Azeri Turkish, Arabic, Georgian, Russian, French, and German sources. In “real” life he is a PhD in mathematics, adjuncting in the CUNY system. See: http://iran.qlineorientalist.com, http://www.qlineorientalist.com/IranRises, and http://www.qlineorientalist.com/Evan.