Learning to Think Slowly: An Intellectual Memoir of Early Graduate School
I arrived in graduate school with more hunger than discipline. The Archive (whatever that meant) looked endless. And Theory felt like a new language that might finally name the questions I had carried for years. Every seminar promised access to a wider world than the one I knew as an undergraduate. I wanted history to bear a great deal of weight: modern secularism, religion, exile, identity, the politics of subjectivity—I expected the field to hold all of this. My early work shows how I tried to make that expectation concrete. One term I pursued anticlericalism and secular faith in the French Third Republic. Another I tried to understand sonority in rural France through Foucault’s heterotopia. A third time I chased after temporality in Thompson and Koselleck, or digital subjectivity and surveillance. The pattern is easy to see now. I reached outward in many directions at once. I sensed that the questions were related, but I did not yet know how. The projects often ran ahead of my methodological training. I had enthusiasm for conceptual work and only a partial grasp of the craft of historical argument. This “memoir” is an attempt to reconstruct that period as a study of formation. I want to understand what I was asking, what I thought I was doing, and what those experiments made possible later.
My first serious seminar papers moved at high speed. The piece on bells and heterotopia is a clear example. I treated Foucault’s category as though it could easily explain the politics of sound in nineteenth century France. I glossed his principles, sketched Corbin’s account of village bells, and then jumped to abstraction. The comments I received focused on pace and legibility. I had skated past the historical material. I had not explained why heterotopia mattered for this case, why bells required that frame, or how specific episodes supported the claims. I had written as if the conceptual apparatus were self-justifying. That feedback was uncomfortable. I had valued the ability to speak in theoretical registers. Now I had to accept a different expectation: description was not an optional prelude to argument; it formed the ground on which argument stood. Readers needed orientation before they could follow a claim into abstraction. In other words, the archive had to appear on the page before a concept could organize it. Over time I began to understand slowness as a discipline. For me, it had to mean something more than abandoning ambitious ideas. It had to mean earning them. A clear paragraph on how a village responded to the loss of a bell often did more intellectual work than an elaborate sentence about heterotopic “slices of time.” That recognition did not come easily. It has proved durable.
My first large research project took shape around Paul Bert and the secularization of education in the Third Republic. On the surface this was a standard topic in French political history. For me it carried a deeper charge. I had long been fascinated by the relation between religious language and secular projects. I wanted to know how a republic could try to strip the Church of influence and still speak with a tone that sounded almost devotional. Working on Bert forced me to read political texts as moral and emotional artifacts. Anticlerical pamphlets, parliamentary speeches, and legislation on schooling staged dramas about purity, corruption, childhood, and the future of the nation. Rémond’s notion of la foi laïque helped me name this. The secular republic tried to cultivate its own “faith,” complete with rituals, martyrs, and enemies.
In the paper, I pushed this pattern toward the language of “discursive formation.” I wanted to show that anticlericalism was a structured way of imagining the world. The ambition was reasonable; the execution, however, remained uneven. I often wrote as if saying “discursive formation” by itself were an explanation. Still, the project altered how I saw secularism in France. It no longer looked like the mere absence of religion but like a competing claim on the sacred. That insight would sit quietly in the background until my work on Iranian exiles. The early paper supplied a vocabulary and a set of examples to which I returned later, once I had a clearer sense of how to connect French laïcité to other histories.
A different seminar directed my attention toward time. Reading E. P. Thompson on industrial capitalism and Reinhart Koselleck on historical temporality convinced me that time itself is a field of struggle and imagination. Thompson described the restructuring of work rhythms, the spread of clock time, and the gradual disciplining of labor. Koselleck traced changes in the relation between past and future, from eschatological horizons to modern expectations of open, indefinite progress. The contrast between them fascinated me. Thompson wrote from a social history of work. Koselleck reflected from a philosophical and linguistic angle. Both challenged intuitive notions of premodern “timelessness” and modern “time-consciousness.”
In my essay, I tried to map their differences and overlaps. I wanted to know how each thinker imagined multiplicity, acceleration, and rupture. The questions were sound. My prose again drifted toward density. I relied heavily on abstract nouns and long subordinate clauses. The basic point, though, remained clear to me—temporality was not simply something people “had,” it was instead shaped by institutions, ideas, and practices. That realization changed how I later approached political movements that lived in multiple temporal registers, such as diasporic activism. Today, when I write about exile, I still hear echoes of that seminar. I ask what kind of time an exile inhabits. I ask how state violence and daily survival reconfigure past and future. Thompson and Koselleck supplied questions I did not yet know how to answer.
The most significant redirection in my training occurred when I began to work on Iranian student activism in postwar France. At first, this looked like a sharp break from the Third Republic and the history of laïcité. It soon became obvious that it was a continuation. The Iranian students I encountered in the archives lived between Tehran and Paris. They wrote against the Shah, engaged French publics, learned the language of human rights, and navigated French leftist milieus. Their activism was at once national and transnational. It depended on the geography of French imperial and post-imperial networks. It also depended on an emotional economy shaped by exile and fear. Working on this material forced me to change habits. I had to read police reports carefully, knowing they encoded suspicion and distortion. I had to value minor references in student bulletins and peripheral remarks in French newspapers. The archive no longer presented itself as a set of clear statements. It appeared as fragments scattered across institutions in multiple countries.
At the same time, the topic confronted me with my own family history. My parents had left Iran and I was a child of that departure. Iranian activists in Paris occupied a world that felt familiar and opaque at once. I needed to ask how my position might sharpen or distort my interpretation. This turn brought older concerns into a new frame. Secularism in France, once an internal national story, now intersected with Iranian debates about religion and modernity. Human rights discourse, once an abstract object of intellectual history, now appeared in flyers and petitions issued by exiled students. The concept of exile, which had been more metaphor than method, started to function as an analytic category.
Throughout these early years I read theory with a mix of excitement and dependency. Foucault, Bhabha, Mbembe, Berlant, Preciado, and others offered powerful accounts of modernity. I often treated their texts as master keys: if a concept appeared to fit a case, I wanted to use it. The cost of that instinct became visible in my writing. Theoretical citations piled up and the primary sources sometimes receded. At several points, mentors encouraged me to reverse the order. They did not tell me to stop reading theory—they asked me to read it differently. That advice changed the atmosphere of my work. Theory gradually shifted from a controlling frame to a set of resources. Foucault’s notion of discipline, for instance, moved from center stage to a supporting role in thinking about student surveillance. Koselleck’s “space of experience” and “horizon of expectation” became prompts rather than templates. The question became less “How does this material confirm the theorist?” and more “What does this material force the theory to notice or ignore?” And a skeptical posture helped. When a concept seemed to fit perfectly, I tried to ask what it concealed. When the language of an author tempted me into mimicry, I stopped and returned to the archive. This adjustment made it more demanding. It also made it more accountable to the evidence.
If the first years taught me to slow my thinking, they also taught me to revise my prose. My early drafts contained long sentences, heavy nominalizations, and frequent shifts of register. I wanted the writing to sound “serious.” The effect was often confusing. Comments from faculty and peers repeatedly pointed back to structure. They asked for a clear line of argument, explicit transitions, and paragraphs that did not carry more claims than they could support. They also asked for a different sense of the reader. I had written as if the reader shared my background and my intuitions about what mattered. The reality was different. Slowly, I accepted that clarity is neither simple nor trivial. It requires control of pacing, a careful use of examples, and attention to repetition. It also requires decisions about what to omit as well as what to include. This forces the writer to choose one main point for a section and let other possible points wait. My new attention to craft altered how I experienced writing. It became less an exercise in display and more a form of work directed toward someone else. That framing has stayed with me in contexts outside the dissertation, too. In those areas, the questions are similar: What does this reader need in order to follow the claim? What can I reasonably ask them to carry?
By the time I had defined my dissertation project, the theme of exile had moved to the center of my thinking. The Iranian students I studied lived outside their country of origin and often imagined return, yet they also built durable lives abroad. Their political activity depended on that double orientation. This raised questions that went beyond the specific case. How does exile reshape the sense of time? Does it compress past and future into a recurring narrative of loss and hope? Does it generate new political geographies, in which Paris, Tehran, and other cities form a circuit rather than a simple line? How do exiles relate to the legal and symbolic structures of the host state, particularly a state like France with a strong republican mythology?
The more I read, the more exile looked like a set of practices and structures, not just a feeling. It organized student associations, influenced choices about language, and shaped decisions about which injustices to foreground. It also intersected with the racial and religious politics of France. Iranian students encountered orientalist stereotypes mediated through a kind of secularism that often struggled to understand non-European religious histories. Working through these issues required me to join empirical research with normative reflection. The archives documented how authorities described Iranian activists, how the students described themselves, and how both groups spoke about rights and violence. The question of how to narrate those materials involved judgments about harm, complicity, and responsibility. I could not avoid that dimension. Exile has become both an object of study and a vantage point. It allows me to see French political culture from an angle that national histories rarely adopt. It also forces me to think more carefully about my own location in the stories I tell.
Looking back across these early projects, I do not see a neat progression. I see clusters of concern that reappear under different guises. The politics of secularism in the Third Republic, the temporalities of modernity, the pharmaco-pornographic analysis of subjectivity, the Franco-Iranian encounters in late nineteenth century travel, the activism of Iranian students in the 1960s and 1970s: each topic seemed distinct when I first approached it. Over time they began to converge. The convergence centers on a few persistent questions. How do people inhabit modern regimes of power without simply reproducing them? How do states claim moral authority, whether in religious or secular terms? How do exiles and migrants stretch and contest national narratives? How do experiences of displacement reshape both politics and theology?
My early papers obviously did not answer these questions—they did something more modest and more important. They taught me which kinds of evidence these questions require. They taught me where my conceptual instincts were helpful and where they obscured more than they revealed. They also taught me how much I did not yet know. That recognition has had a stabilizing effect. It prevents me from treating any single framework as final. It also keeps a certain intellectual curiosity alive. If a new archive, or a new conversation partner, complicates my assumptions, that is not a threat to coherence. It is a sign that the project remains open.
The years since those first seminars have involved more archival travel, more teaching, more writing, and more engagement with communities outside the university. Each activity feeds back into the others. Teaching undergraduates how to read a document trains me, again, to make my own claims transparent. Church work presses questions about moral responsibility that then reappear in how I write about political violence. Conversations with colleagues in other fields expose the limits of my habitual categories. I believe the fundamental orientation remains the same. I want to produce historical writing that is careful with evidence and honest about stakes. I want to think with, rather than over, the people whose lives I study. I want to retain a measure of skepticism toward my own interpretive habits. That orientation took shape in my early graduate years. It emerged in the friction between the resistant details of the archives themselves. This “memoir” of that period records how certain questions came to matter to me, and how I began to learn what it might take to answer them with integrity.
