UCLA Humanities

Bilingual Lecture Series: Pooyan Tamimi Arab
2026-06-08 11:00 - 13:00 (America/Los_Angeles) | CA
Woman Life Freedom in the Mirror of Scholarship: Responses from the Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences

Pooyan Tamimi Arab
Utrecht University
English Lecture
Monday, June 8, 2026 at 11:00 am Pacific Time
Online via Zoom
Registration Required:
https://ucla.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_y6a-WJxYTX-wwqBuhAYndg

This presentation will survey scholarship in the arts, humanities, and social sciences responding to the Woman, Life, Freedom uprising in Iran. Drawing on a bibliography of over one hundred publications—books, journal articles, and edited volume chapters published since the death of Jina (Mahsa) Amini in September 2022—it will outline four main thematic clusters: Chronologies, Culture, Aesthetics, and Nation. These will serve to map shifting interpretations of women’s emancipation, cultural change and resistance, visual activism, and national belonging. The presentation will also reflect on how to research a protest movement from exile and draw attention to under-cited sources, including scholarship produced in Iran.

Pooyan Tamimi Arab is Associate Professor of Secular and Religious Studies at Utrecht University, a member of the Young Academy of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences, and a member of GAMAAN—the Group for Analyzing and Measuring Attitudes in Iran. Between 2025 and 2030, he is the principal investigator of Iran’s Secular Shift, a mixed-methods project on non-religion and demands for political secularism funded by the Dutch Research Council.
