Minoo Moallem

Minoo Moallem is a Gender & Women's Studies professor at the University of California, Berkeley. She is the director of the Critical Iranian and Persianate Studies Program (https://iranianstudies.berkeley.edu/). She was the director of the Media Studies Program from 2017 to 2023 and the department chair from 2010 to 2012. Before moving to Berkeley, she was the Women's Studies department chair at SF State from 2001 to 2006. Trained as a sociologist, she writes on postcolonial and transnational feminist studies, commodity cultures, Islamic nationalism, Middle Eastern studies, and Iranian visual cultures and diasporas. Professor Moallem received the UC Berkeley Chancellor's Award for Public Service in 2010.

She is the author of  Persian Carpets: The Nation as a Transnational Commodity (Routledge, 2018). Between Warrior Brother and Veiled Sister: Islamic Fundamentalism and the Cultural Politics of Patriarchy in Iran (the University of California Press, 2005), and the co-editor (with Caren Kaplan and Norma Alarcon) of Between Woman and Nation: Nationalisms, Transnational Feminisms, and The State (Duke University Press, 1999). She is the guest editor of a special issue of Comparative Studies South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East on Iranian Immigrants, Exiles, and Refugees. Professor Moallem has also ventured into digital media. Her digital project, "Nation-on-the-Move" (design by Eric Loyer), was published in Vectors—Journal of Culture and Technology in a Dynamic Vernacular.  Her new co-edited book with Paola Bacchetta is Fatema Mernissi for Our Times (Syracuse University Press, March 2025).

Moallem is the author of numerous articles and book chapters in English, French, and Farsi. Her most recent articles and book chapters include "Weaving Connections: Carpet Art, Community + Environment";  2023, de Young\Legion of Honor, Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco; March 2023, "Networks of Relationalities through the Lens of Material Culture"; In The Routledge Companion to Intersectionalities, Edited By Jennifer C. Nash, Samantha Pinto 2023; Right-Wing Studies: A Roundtable on the State of the Field (PDF file) 2022; "Gender, Race, and Religion: Islamophobia and Beyond,"; in Meridians. Feminism, Race, and Transnationalism (2021); "The Figure of the Martyr in Iran-Iraq Postwar Movies," in Studies of South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East (2022); "Dowreh Series: Mimi Thi Nguyen and Minoo Moallem in Conversation," Jadaliyya (2021) ; "Gender and Culture," Wiley Blackwell Encyclopedia of Sociology, 2nd Edition, (2019); "Reflections on Doing Digital Humanities in the Context of the Middle East" in Routledge Handbook of Middle East Politics (2020); "Staging Masculinity in Iran-Iraq War Movies" in Handbook on Asian Cinema edited by Aaron Magnan-Park, Gina Marchetti, and Tan See-Kam, Palgrave, (2018); "The Unintended Consequences of Equality Within Difference," Brown Journal of World Affairs, fall 2015; "Revisiting the Mostazaf and the Mostakbar," in Feminist Futures, New edition, Zed Press, 2016; “Aestheticizing Religion: Sensorial Visuality and Coffeehouse Painting in Iran" in Sensational Religion edited by Sally Pomey, Yale University Press, 2015, and "Praying Through the Senses” published by Yale Center for the Study of Material and Visual Cultures.

She has given many keynote lectures, invited talks, and conference papers both in the US and internationally. She is currently working on a book manuscript provisionally titled Filmic Archive, National Memory, and Iran-Iraq War Movies; a research project entitled Cathartic Rhythms, Tactility and Geo-aesthetics in Carpet-Inspired Art, and another on Gender and the Politics of Petroleum.

Professor Moallem is an Affiliated faculty: Folklore Graduate Group; Near East Studies Department; Center for Middle Eastern Studies; Center for the Study of Race and Gender; Berkeley Center for Globalization and Information Technology; Center for New Media; Science, Technology and Society Center; Blum Center for Developing Economies; Center for the Study of Right-Wing Movements, and Graduate Group in Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and Center for New Racial Studies, A Multi-Campus Research Program.