Dr Ehsan Kashfi
IASH-Alwaleed Postdoctoral Fellow, September 2026 - June 2027
Ehsan is a political scientist working on migration, diaspora politics, and transnational engagement, focusing on how displacement and resettlement reshape political subjectivities, belonging, and participation. He received his PhD in Political Science from the University of Alberta, where his dissertation, on the politics of identity in post-revolutionary Iran, received the Best Dissertation Award from the Western Political Science Association. His work has appeared in Digest of Middle East Studies, Soccer and Society, and Studies in Ethnicity and Nationalism, and his monograph, Rewriting Iran: Memory, Commemoration, and Identity in the Islamic Republic, is under contract with Bloomsbury/I.B. Tauris.
Project title: Migration, Secularism and the Politics of Religion in the Iranian Diaspora
This project looks at how Iranians in Europe negotiate religion; a negotiation that often takes the form of a critique of Islam rooted not in unfamiliarity but in prior experience of religion enforced as state policy. It traces where that critique surfaces, who is licensed to articulate it, and which audiences it is pitched to. The project builds a conceptual vocabulary to distinguish this diaspora-internal phenomenon from Islamophobia and asks what happens when the critique is taken up as native testimony by European anti-Muslim politics.