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Volume 2, Issue 2 | December 2025 | Persian Gulf Studies

In recent years heat waves, droughts, sandstorms, toxic pollution, and more have made the lives of people living in…

In this conversation, Azam Khatam speaks with Kaveh Ehsani (Associate professor of international studies, DePaul…

This interview explores the evolving landscape of Gulf Studies, highlighting the work of a scholar whose research…

Crude Oil and the Mirage of Development draws on Roya Khoshnevis’s doctoral dissertation, defended in 2021 at the…

The Persian Gulf has always been simpler to conquer than to define; empires found taking possession far easier than…

There has been a renewed interest in revisiting Ebrahim Golestan’s early documentary films about oil. This is in…

If we set aside the long and tumultuous history that Kharg has endured, the island acquired a distinct status…

The seventeen-volume collection Military Geography of Iran, published in Tehran between 1941 and 1946 and…

The establishment of the field of “Persian Gulf Studies” and the creation of universities and research institutes…

In recent decades, the study of migration in eastern Arabia and the Persian Gulf has become one of the most dynamic…

My dissertation investigates how struggles over land and labor in date agriculture and oil extraction around the…

Since 2020, I’ve been conducting ethnographic and historical research about property at sea in the lower Persian…

My dissertation, Indigenous Refusal, is an ethnographic and historical study of Arab communities in Khuzestan, a…

This dissertation traces how citizenship and migration shaped the politics of the midcentury Persian Gulf, with a…

In the absence of explicitly spatial historiographies of Iran, we definitely should celebrate the publication…

The Persian Gulf Studies Quarterly (PGSQ) is one of the few Iranian periodicals dedicated exclusively to the study…

Volume 2, Issue 1 | June 2025 | Migration and the Iranian Diaspora

Around the turn of the twentieth century, small yet diverse Iranian emigrant communities had established themselves…

This article introduces and examines three distinct works that explore the experiences of Iranian migrants, each…

In his book, Longing to Leave: Migration in the Iranian Intersubjectivity, Mehrdad Arabestani explores migration as…

Migration studies in Iran have predominantly focused on outmigration and the desires of those seeking to leave,…

Although migration has been a significant phenomenon in Iran for a long time, it has become a central factor in…

In the introduction to a field-defining 2011 special issue about Iranian Diaspora Studies, Babak Elahi and Persis…

I had always thought my confusion about my own racial identity had more to do with the light skin and blue eyes I…

It’s nearly impossible to attend an Iranian celebration—whether a wedding, party, or Nowruz gathering—anywhere in…

This conversation between Iranian-American scholars Dr. Amy Malek and Dr. Persis Karim in July 2025, reflects on…

Iran’s Migration Observatory had a short lifespan. Launched in 2017 at Sharif University in Tehran, it was…

In recent years, the notion of home has become a central concern in diaspora and migration studies–not merely as a…