Pouya Alimagham
- Education:
- University of California, Berkeley, Bachelor of Arts
Harvard University, Master of Arts
University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Master of Arts
University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Ph.D.
Biography
Pouya Alimagham is a historian of the modern Middle East. He taught for nearly a decade
at MIT, and has also taught at Boston University. He also served as a Faculty Affiliate
between 2023-2025 at Harvard Kennedy School’s Middle East Initiative. He joined Chapman
University’s History Department in the Fall of 2025.
Dr. Alimagham specializes on modern Iran, social movements in the wider Middle East,
Orientalism, Political Islam and post-Islamism, women and gender, and the intersections
therein.
His dissertation, titled: Contesting the Iranian Revolution: The Green Uprising, was the 2016 winner of the Association for Iranian Studies’ Mehrdad Mashayekhi Dissertation Award, which is presented biannually. In the study, he argued that the Green Uprising in 2009 was a culmination of a decades-long history that constituted a post-Islamist paradigm shift in Iran. He harnessed wider regional history as well as Iran’s own revolutionary past in order to underscore his thesis. The manuscript was published in expanded form with Cambridge University Press in 2020. His other articles and book chapters cover the Arab Spring, Iranian protest music, women in Middle East revolutions, sectarianism, and the psycho-history of post-9/11 discourse.
He has extensive experience teaching such courses as “Palestine and the Arab-Israeli
Conflict,” “The Modern Middle East,” a survey course, “Islam, the Middle East, and
the West,” which covers the early Islamic period until the present, focusing on the
life of Muhammad and Quranic exegesis, and unpacking thematic issues, such as Orientalism,
colonialism and nationalism, political Islam, whether such a bipolarity of “Islam
and the West” is useful, Islamophobia, and the “Clash of Civilizations.” In the fall
of 2018, he also designed, instituted, and taught for the first time, “Modern Iran:
A Century of Revolution.”
In the spring of 2019, MIT’s School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences (SHASS)
awarded him the Levitan Teaching Award. In his final semester at MIT (Spring 2025), he received the MLK Leadership Award. Both awards were the result of student-initiated processes.
His interviews can be found on Al Jazeera English, Al Jazeera Arabic, BBC, BBC Persian, and France 24, and his quotes can be read at The Independent, Al Jazeera, Asia Times, and Newsweek. He regularly publishes opinion pieces in liberal, centrist, and conservative media.