Assistant Professor of Politics
Arash Davari is assistant professor of Politics at Whitman College. His research and teaching interests include modern political theory; history and theory; aesthetics and politics; postcolonial political theory; and state formation and social change in the Middle East, with a focus on modern Iran. He holds a Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of California, Los Angeles.
He is currently completing a book manuscript that revisits historiographical debates about the 1979 revolution in Iran. The manuscript identifies parallels between the logics of revolt in Iran and those found in popular social mobilization since, at once situating Iranian revolutionary resistance in the context of global transformations in the 1970s and making a case for developing theoretical concepts from the periphery.In 2015-16, he was an ACLS/Mellon Dissertation Fellow. In 2013 he co-founded B|ta’arof, a print journal for Iranian arts and writings.
Education
Ph.D., Political Science, University of California, Los Angeles (2016)
M.A., Political Science, University of California, Los Angeles (2012)
M.A., Rhetoric, University of California, Berkeley (2008)
B.A., Comparative Literature, University of California, Los Angeles (2003)
Selected Publications
Articles & Chapters
“Like 1979 All Over Again: Resisting Left Liberalism Among Iranian Émigrés,” in With Stones In Our Hands: Reflections on Racism, Muslims and U.S. Empire, eds. Sohail Daulatzai and Junaid Rana (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2018)
“On Democratic Leadership and Social Change: Locating Du Bois in the Shadow of a Gray To-come” in A Political Companion to W.E.B. Du Bois, ed. Nick Bromell (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 2018)
“A Return to Which Self?: 'Ali Shari'ati and Frantz Fanon on the Political Ethics of Insurrectionary Violence,” in Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East, 34, no. 1 (2014), 86-105
Reviews, Commentary & Reference Articles
Review of Asef Bayat, REVOLUTION WITHOUT REVOLUTIONARIES: MAKING SENSE OF THE ARAB SPRING, Political Theory (2018)
Review of Siavash Saffari, BEYOND SHARIATI: MODERNITY, COSMOPOLITANISM, AND ISLAM IN IRANIAN POLITICAL THOUGHT, International Journal of Middle East Studies 50, no. 1 (2018): 165-167
Review of Behrooz Ghamari-Tabrizi, FOUCAULT IN IRAN: ISLAMIC REVOLUTION AFTER THE ENLIGHTENMENT, The British Journal of Middle East Studies 44, no. 3 (2017): 464-465
Arash Davari, "Du Bois, William Edward Burghardt" in The Encyclopedia of Political Thought, ed. Michael T. Gibbons (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2015), 963-966
Courses
Introduction to Modern European Political Theory, POL 122
Islam and Politics, POL 207
Middle East Politics, POL 208
The Art of Revolution, POL 301
Humanism between Europe and its Others, POL 312