Afsaneh Najmabadi
The National Endowment for the Humanities supports Women’s Worlds in Qajar Iran:
A Digital Archive and Website at Harvard University
March 2009
The National Endowment for the Humanities has made a $346,733 grant to a team of Qajar historians. The purpose of this grant, which spans from May 2009 to June 2011, is to develop a comprehensive digital archive and website that will preserve, link, and render accessible primary source materials related to the social and cultural history of women’s worlds during the reign of the Qajar dynasty (1785 – 1925) in Iran.
The Qajar dynasty is perhaps most notable for a series of intense interactions with Europe (Britain and Russia, in particular), many of which introduced cultural and political changes that still resonate in Iran today. The proposed archive will address a significant gap in the scholarship related to this important time in Iran’s history by making available personal documents, such as writings and photographs, created by, and reflecting the lives of, women during the Qajar era.
The team is composed of Afsaneh Najmabadi (PI, Harvard University), Manoutchehr Eskandari-Qajar (Santa Barbara City College), Dominic Parviz Brookshaw (University of Manchester, UK), Nahid Mozaffari (New York University), and Naghmeh Sohrabi (Brandeis University).
The technical producer for the project will be Charles Forcey of Historicus, Inc. His previous work includes the Visual Index to the Virtual Archive 1 & 2 (Skyscraper Museum at www.skyscraper.org), the Primary Source Investigator (McGraw-Hill Higher Education at psi.mcgraw-hill.com), and a prototype for Arts of the Islamic World (Shelly and Donald Rubin Foundation at www.artsoftheislamicworld.org).
Digitizing and archiving activities supported by this grant will focus primarily on materials from the private family holdings and Iranian archival holdings. Harvard University already houses other digital archives related to history of modern Iran, such as the ‘Ali Khan Vali photograph album and the Iranian Oral History Project. The new project will make the University Libraries a very rich depository of archival material for study of modern Iranian history.
For further information, please contact Afsaneh Najmabadi najmabad@fas.harvard.edu.