Rate My Professor Golnar Nikpour

Golnar Nikpour is an Associate Professor of History at Dartmouth College, where she specializes in modern Iranian political and intellectual history, with a particular interest in the history of law, incarceration, revolution, and rights. She earned her Ph.D., M.Phil., and M.A. from Columbia University's Department of Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies, and her B.A. from Barnard College. Nikpour teaches an interdisciplinary array of courses, including modern Middle Eastern and North African history, Iranian history, political theory, Islamic studies, critical prison studies, colonialism and decolonization, and women and gender studies.

Prior to her appointment at Dartmouth, Nikpour held the position of A.W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at the Center for the Humanities at the University of Wisconsin-Madison from 2015 to 2017, followed by the Neubauer Junior Research Fellow role at the Crown Center for Middle East Studies at Brandeis University from 2017 to 2018. Her research has received support from the Social Science Research Council, the A.W. Mellon Foundation, and the Whiting Foundation. Nikpour contributes to the academic community through various editorial roles: since 2019, she has been part of the editorial collective for Radical History Review, serves on the editorial board of the Radical Histories of the Middle East book series by Oneworld Press, and is co-founder and co-editor of B|ta'arof, a journal dedicated to Iranian arts and writing. Her scholarship has appeared in prestigious outlets such as Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East; Humanity: An International Journal of Human Rights, Humanitarianism, and Development; the International Journal of Middle East Studies; Iranian Studies; The Canadian Journal of History; The New York Times; and Jadaliyya.

Her first monograph, The Incarcerated Modern: Prisons and Public Life in Iran, was published by Stanford University Press in 2024. Notable publications include "Khomeini Kitsch: Material Cultures of the Iran Hostage Crisis" in Iranian Studies (2025), "From Fallen Women to Citizen Mothers: Gendered Carcerality in Pahlavi Iran" in the International Journal of Middle East Studies (2022), "The Criminal is the Patient, the Prison Will Be the Cure: Building the Carceral Imaginary in Modern Iran" in Global 1979: Geographies and Histories of the Iranian Revolution (Cambridge University Press, 2020), "Claiming Human Rights: Iranian Political Prisoners and the Making of a Transnational Movement, 1963-1979" in Humanity (2018), and "Revolutionary Journeys, Revolutionary Practice: The Hajj Writings of Jalal Al-e Ahmad and Malcolm X" in Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East (2014).