CAS Global Perspectives event

Guest speaker: Sima Shakhsari

Sima Shakhsari is the chair of the department of Gender, Women & Sexuality Studies at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities. They earned their PhD in Cultural and Social Anthropology at Stanford University and have an MA in Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies from San Francisco State University.

Before joining the University of Minnesota, Shakhsari held postdoctoral positions at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wolf Humanities Center and the Women’s and Gender Studies Department at the University of Houston, taught at Wellesley College, and worked as the director of Adult Education Program at San Francisco Women Against Rape.

Shakhsari's interdisciplinary research intersects with transnational feminist theory, transnational sexuality studies, queer and transgender studies, Middle East studies, critical refugee studies and political anthropology. Their areas of specialization include refugees, diasporas, empire, militarism, neoliberal governmentality, biopolitics, necropolitics, civil society and digital media.

Shakhsari's book, Politics of Rightful Killing: Civil Society, Gender, and Sexuality in Weblogistan (Duke University Press, 2020) received the Fatema Mernissi Book Award Honorable Mention from the Middle East Studies Association. Their second book, tentatively titled Moving Queers & Queer Moves: Deterritorialization and Loaned Life, combines ethnographic research among Iranian queer and transgender refugees and refugee rights organizations with the analysis of queer diasporic literature and films to explore the way that Iranian transgender refugees shuttle between rightfulness and rightlessness as they transition from the naturalized domains of sexuality and citizenship to zones of indeterminacy.