Naveed Mansoori is a political theorist interested in media and religion with a focus on the intellectual history of modern Iran. He received a PhD in Political Science from UCLA in September 2019. He is currently an ACLS Emerging Voices Fellow in the University of Virginia's Religion, Race, and Democracy Lab. His current book project, After Prophecy: Propaganda and the Politics of Truth in Contemporary Iran, examines how literary, aural, cinematic, televisual, and digital media ecologies have emerged as informal pedagogical spaces and as sites of subject-formation. After Prophecy begins with Shi’a intellectuals in the interwar period who popularized a narrative of decline where modernity signaled the culminating end of the prophetic tradition. Shi’a intellectuals saw in propaganda the potential to revive prophecy. The book project tracks the afterlife of this discourse through the 1979 Islamic Revolution and the founding of the Islamic Republic to the 2009 Green Movement. It demonstrates that in moments of crisis concerning national identity, propaganda restored faith in the world and enacted it anew. His writing has appeared in Comparative Islamic Studies, Society & Space, and The Guardian. He has a forthcoming article in Theory & Event on political silence in the two decades leading up to the Islamic Revolution of Iran, a forthcoming contribution to L’esprit and Liberation: An Ali Shari’ati Reader, and is co-editing a handbook on the lived experience of ideology for The Routledge Handbooks on Political Ideologies, Practices and Interpretations book series. From 2017-2019, he held the Elahé Omidyar Mir Djalali Fellowship for Excellence in Persian Studies. Before coming to University of Virginia, Mansoori was a Visiting Scholar in the Department of Political Science at San Francisco State University.
