Shahla Talebi

Shahla Talebi is Assistant Professor of Religious Studies in the School of Historical, Philosophical and Religious Studies at Arizona State University. A native of Iran, she was imprisoned from 1977 to 1978 and again from 1983 to 1992, first by the former Shah and later by the Islamic Republic, for her political beliefs and activities, before leaving Iran in 1994. She received her undergraduate degree in social-cultural anthropology from the University of California at Berkeley and her masters and PhD, also in social cultural anthropology, from Columbia University. Her research interests include questions of self-sacrifice and martyrdom, violence, memory, trauma, death, burial, funerary rituals, commemoration and memorialization or their banning, religion, revolution, and the nation-state in contemporary Iran. She is the author of Ghosts of Revolution: Rekindled Memories of Imprisonment in Iran (Stanford, 2011); recent articles include: “From the Light of the Eye to the Eye of the Power” and "Who is Behind the Name? A Story of Violence, Loss, and Melancholic Survival in Post-Revolutionary Iran."