Kusha Sefat

I am an Assistant Professor in Sociology at the University of Tehran and an affiliate of the university’s Institute for Environmental Studies. Trained in both anthropology and sociology, I hold an MA in Anthropology from the University of Pennsylvania and a Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of Cambridge, where I was a Queens’ College Walker Scholar. My work contributes to the nexus of material culture, postcolonialism, and Middle East Studies, with a particular emphasis on Iran. I publish in English and Farsi and sit on the editorial boards of several journals, including Cultural Sociology.

I am the author of Revolution of Things: The Islamism and Post-Islamism of Objects in Tehran (Princeton University Press, 2023). The book explores the dynamism between materiality and language in post-revolutionary Iran, illustrating how shifting relationships between everyday objects and words generate domination, rupture, and war as qualitatively distinct social fields, with each constellation affording and foreclosing unique modes of political action. The book has been reviewed in American Journal of Sociology, American Ethnologist, Social Forces, Cultural Sociology, Contemporary Sociology, Material Culture, British Journal of Middle East Studies, and, not least, Middle East Journal. I have been invited to present the book at Yale University, Columbia University, The New School, University of Pennsylvania, Princeton University, LSE, UCL, University of Duisburg-Essen, and VU Amsterdam.

I publish in the fields of historical, cultural, political, and environmental sociology in various journals, including International Political Sociology; Media, Culture and Society; Iranian Studies; International Journal of Baudrillard Studies; Faslnam-e Motaleaat va Tahghighat Ejtemaee (in Farsi); and, not least, Faslnam-e Motaleaat-e Farhangi va Ertebataat (in Farsi). I also write about politics and the environment in literary magazines, including Michigan Quarterly Review and Majal-e Aftaab (in Farsi). I am the editor of a special issue on Iran and Materiality in Iranian Studies, the leading interdisciplinary journal on the Persianate world. This issue brings together some of the foremost scholars in the field who decenter the human in social analysis, foregrounding the generative role of nonhumans in politics, culture, economy, and religion.

My current book project, Erasing the Animal: An Ecological History of Speciesism and Racialization in Modern Iran, examines how the shifting boundaries between humans and animals became foundational to Iranian modernity and its ecological crises. Rather than merely recovering lost animal histories, the project treats speciesism as a formative structure that shaped modern social and political life. It argues that, from the Safavid (1501–1736) through the Qajar (1789–1925) periods, the disappearance of animals from public life and the archival record helped define “the human” as a political category and “the animal” as its racializing foil. Reading Persian chronicles, legal writings, art, and reformist periodicals against their own anthropocentric grain, the study explores how enslaved Africans in Iran were relegated to the animal side of this divide, enabling both the juridical codification of slaves as property (molk-e yamin) and the standardization of castration to create African eunuchs for free labor. These processes underwrote the emergence of extractive property and labor relations that extended to the environment through the commodification of land, water, and human as well as more-than-human worlds. By connecting speciesism to this structural transformation, the project reveals how the same forces that produced racial hierarchies also laid the foundations for Iran’s modern ecological crisis. Combining visual analysis, textual interpretation, and critical animal studies, it situates Iran within global histories of species, race, and environment, reframing ecological breakdown as a structural legacy of modernity and empire.

I am an immigrant and grew up in Tehran (Iran), Bombay and Pune (India), and Lexington, Atlanta, and Long Beach (U.S.). In California, I was a ska and reggae musician with Skunk Records and performed with Jah Fellowship, Chapter 11, and Tomorrows Bad Seeds.