Bio

Field: History
Interests: Labor history, oil, social movements, revolutions, development of capitalism

Peyman Jafari received his Ph.D. degree in history from Leiden University. His dissertation Oil, Labor and Revolution: A Social History of Labor in the Iranian Oil Industry, 1973-83, was the 2020 recipient of the “The Mehrdad Mashayekhi Dissertation Award” from the Association for Iranian Studies.

Jafari’s research is focused on the history of labor, energy, infrastructures and ecology. Using archives, oral history and statistical data, Jafari’s current book project provides an original history of class, ethnic, and gender relations among Iranian oil workers, and explores their workplace and everyday life experiences, relationship to the state and management, and collective actions.

In 2022, he was awarded a Veni Talent Program Grant by the Dutch Research Council for his second book project: Oil Frontiers in the British and Dutch Empires: Land, Labour and Environment in the Making of an Imperial Oil Regime, 1890-1940. This global history project compares and connects two case studies, southern Iran while under the influence of the British Empire and the Dutch East Indies. It offers a bottom-up perspective on how oil frontiers transformed the countryside in these regions and integrated them into global capitalism through the movement of people, ideas and technologies.

Jafari has published two monographs in Dutch and German, titled respectively Het andere Iran: van de revolutie tot vandaag [The other Iran: from the revolution to the present] (Ambo/Anthos 2009) and Der andere Iran: Geschichte und Kultur von 1900 bis zur Gegenwart [The Other Iran: History and Culture from 1900 to the present] (C.H. Beck, 2010). He is also a co-editor of Worlds of Labor Turned Upside Down: Labor Relations and Revolutions in Global Perspective (Brill, 2021) and, Iran in the Middle East: Transnational Encounters and Social History (IB Tauris, 2015). His articles have appeared in various peer-reviewed journals, including Labor History, International Labor and Working-Class History, Workers of the World - International Journal on Strikes and Social Conflicts.

Before joining the Sharmin and Bijan Mossavar-Rahmani Center for Iran and Persian Gulf Studies as a Postdoctoral Research Associate, Jafari was a lecturer at the History Department of the University of Amsterdam (2017-2019), and a visiting scholar at SOAS (2011) and Columbia University (New York, 2014).