Description:

Completed in 1938, the Trans-Iranian Railway connected the Caspian Sea and the Persian Gulf. Drawing on newspapers, industry publications, travelogues, and memoirs, as well as American, British, Danish, and Iranian archival materials, Mikiya Koyagi traces contested imaginations and practices of mobility from the conception of a trans-Iranian rilway project during the nineteenth century to its early years of operation on the eve of Iran's oil nationalization movement in the 1950s.  He considers how the infrastructural megaproject reoriented the flow of people and goods, and reshaped the relationship of the provinces to Tehran.

Mikiya Koyagi is Assistant Professor of Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Texas at Austin.  He is a historian of the modern Middle East, with an emphasis on the social and cultural history of nineteenth and twentieth century Iran.  His first book, Iran in Motion, received the 2022 Saidi-Sirjani Book Award.

Lunch will be served at the event.