Assistant Professor of Politics
Arash Davari is assistant professor of Politics at Whitman College. His research and teaching interests include modern, postcolonial, and contemporary political theory; history and theory; aesthetics and politics; 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 about the 1979 revolution in Iran. The manuscript identifies parallels between revolt in Iran and popular social mobilization since, situating the Iranian revolution in the context of global transformations in the 1970s while making a case for political theory from the periphery.
Selected Publications
Articles & Chapters
(Co-authored with Naghmeh Sohrabi), “A Sky Drowning in Stars: Global 1968, the Death of Takhti, and the Birth of the Iranian Revolution” in Global 1979: Geographies and Histories of the Iranian Revolution, eds. Arang Keshavarzian and Ali Mirsepassi (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021)
“ Paradox as Decolonization: Ali Shariati’s Islamic Lawgiver,” Political Theory, Online First (December 2020)
“ 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
Review Essays
“ On Inexactitude in Decolonization,” Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East, vol. 40, no. 3 (December 2020): 627-635
“ Writing Iran from Exile: An Accented History,” Comparative Islamic Studies 13, no. 1-2 (2019): 151-162
Review of Asef Bayat, Revolution without Revolutionaries: Making Sense of the Arab Spring, Political Theory (2018)
Briefs, Commentary & Reference Articles
“ U.S.-Iran Relations under Maximum Pressure: A Narrow Path to Negotiations,” Middle East Brief, no. 137 (Brandeis University, Crown Center for Middle East Studies, September 10, 2020)
Covering Iran: Leftist Continuities and Discontinuities, from Propaganda to PR,” TRAFO – Blog for Transregional Research, July 11, 2019
“ 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