Newsletter: September 29, 2023
View outside of the International Institute of Social History, Amsterdam. Author’s photo.
Welcome to my newsletter and blog: Persepolis Unbound. My name is Keanu Heydari. I’m a doctoral candidate in History at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. I study the Iranian diaspora in France in the twentieth century. I’m also interested in New Testament studies and modern theology.
Updates
On 12 June 2023, I flew from Los Angeles to Paris and spent just over a month in the city. In Paris, I stayed at the Fondation des États-Unis, part of the Cité internationale universitaire de Paris residential complex in the fourteenth arrondissement. On 17 July 2023, I traveled to Amsterdam and spent just under two weeks in the city, staying at a centrally located hotel. Briefly returning to Paris, I then flew from CDG back to Los Angeles on 30 July 2023. I returned to Ann Arbor, Michigan, on August 20, 2023 to begin the sixth year of my Ph.D. in History at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. I have one chapter of my dissertation under my belt and I project four more. My research trip to Europe this summer was tremendously productive: I visited archives in Paris and Amsterdam.
My time in Paris was divided between the Archives Nationales in Pierrefitte-sur-Seine and the Archives de la Préfecture de Police in Le Pré-Saint-Gervais. In Amsterdam, I consulted the International Institute of Social History and worked closely with the museum and with Dr. Touraj Atabaki to digitize hours of recordings between Prof. Afshin Matin-Asgari and former Iranian student radicals in France and elsewhere.
Documents at the Archives Nationales included files under dérogation, among others. These documents include highly sensitive information about police surveillance of Iranian student activists, press clippings, and dossiers about various Iranian students. Documents at the Archives de la Préfecture de Police, similar to those at the Archives Nationales, also include detailed discussion of Iranian student organizations from the 1950s to the 1970s. The documents at the Paris police archive provided me enough primary source material to finalize a draft of the first chapter of my dissertation.
It’s now the fifth week of the fall semester. In addition to my dissertation writing and research, I’m serving as a GSI (Graduate Student Instructor) for History 312 (also cross-listed in the Political Science department), “The History of European Integration,” taught by Prof. Dario Gaggio. I’m also working as a GSM (Graduate Student Mentor), working with earlier-stage graduate students in the History department to hone their pedagogical skills. Finally, I’m working as a GSIC (Graduate Student Instructional Consultant) at the University’s Center for Research on Learning and Teaching (CRLT).
This year, I’m co-coordinating the university’s Rackham Interdisciplinary Workshop, the European History Workshop, with my colleague, Paige Newhouse. This semester, I’ll be presenting some of my research at the Eisenberg Institute for Historical Studies workshop, “The Consequences of Colonialism, Capitalism, and Empire: Looking Out from the Archive.” I’ll also be presenting a paper at the 2023 Social Science History Association meeting in Washington, D.C., in November. Although it is somewhat tentative now, I also plan on presenting at the 2024 Society for French Historical Studies conference.
