Sima Shakhsari

Sima Shakhsari is the 2010-2012 Postdoctoral Fellow in the Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Program at the University of Houston and starts her position as assistant professor in the Women’s and Gender Studies Department at Wellesley College in Fall 2012. She earned her Ph.D. in Cultural and Social Anthropology from Stanford University and has taught Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality and Anthropology courses at the University of California at Berkeley, Stanford University, San Francisco State University, and the University of Houston. Her research interests include the Iranian diaspora, cyberspace, queer studies, immigration, transnational feminist studies, and Middle Eastern Studies. She is currently working on a book manuscript titled Blogging in Times of War: Iranian Diaspora, Gender, and Sexuality in Weblogistan. Shakhsari's new research, which is connected to the larger discursive context of the freedom movements in the Middle East and democratization projects in Iran, explores the way that biopolitics, necropolitics, and geopolitics produce and expend Middle Eastern queer lives in the name of freedom and rights during the “war on terror.” Her publications include “Weblogistan goes to war: representational practices, gendered soldiers and neoliberal entrepreneurship in diaspora” (Feminist Review, 2011); “Shuttling Between Bodies and Borders: Transmigration and the Politics of Rightful Killing” (Transgender Studies Reader II, forthcoming); “Chic of Queer and the Politics of Representation: Cyberspace, War on Terror, and the Hypervisible Iranian Queer” (Queering Middle Eastern Cyberscapes: Journal of Middle Eastern Women’s Studies Special Issue, 2012); and “Women, Gender, and Sexuality in Historiography of Modern Iran,” (co-authored with Afsaneh Najmabadi and Mana Kia, Iran in the 20th Century: Historiography and Political Culture, 2009).