Rate My Professor Jamshid Tehrani

Professor Jamshid Tehrani is a Professor in the Department of Anthropology at Durham University. His research focuses on cultural evolution, exploring how culture evolves as it is transmitted from person to person and from generation to generation. He investigates what makes some cultural elements catch on while others die out, and how these processes shape patterns of cultural diversity within and across populations. Trained in social anthropology at the London School of Economics, Tehrani earned a Master's degree in Human Evolution and Behaviour at University College London. He completed his PhD in Anthropology at University College London in 2005, with a thesis on the transmission of craft traditions among Iranian tribal groups.

Tehrani's academic career includes a postdoctoral research fellowship at the AHRC Centre for the Evolution of Cultural Diversity at University College London in 2006. He joined Durham University in 2007 as a RCUK Research Fellow, was appointed Lecturer in Anthropology in 2012, promoted to Chair in 2020, and served as Head of the Department of Anthropology from 2022 to 2025. His current work centers on the transmission of popular narratives, including traditional folktales, urban legends, and modern-day conspiracy theories. Research specializations encompass cultural evolution, phylogenetic analysis of culture, social learning, cognitive anthropology, oral traditions, and fairy tales. Key publications include "Human niche construction in interdisciplinary focus" (Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, 2011), "The Phylogeny of Little Red Riding Hood" (PLOS ONE, 2013), "Comparative phylogenetic analyses uncover the ancient roots of Indo-European folktales" (Royal Society Open Science, 2016), "Cinderella’s Family Tree: A Phylomemetic Case Study of ATU 510/511" (Fabula, 2023), and chapters such as "Descent with Imagination: Oral Traditions as Evolutionary Lineages" (2020). He is editor of the Oxford Handbook of Cultural Evolution (Oxford University Press, 2025). His research has received over 3,300 citations on Google Scholar.