Omar Khayyam Postdoctoral Research Associate in Iranian Studies Mehrdad Babadi is a cultural anthropologist specializing in marriage and gender, modern intimacies, the transition to adulthood and masculinities in Iran and the broader Middle East. He earned his Ph.D. from the Department of Anthropology at Boston University in May 2023. His dissertation, “Marriage Postponed: The Transformation of Intimacy in Contemporary Iran,” utilized ethnographic and interview-based data to explore new patterns of youth intimacy, the evolution of young people’s perspectives on premarital relationships and the reasons behind the widespread delay in marriage among university-educated young Iranians. Babadi integrates sociocultural, psychological and moral perspectives to explain the primary reasons for the delay in marriage. His research concludes that the postponement of marriage, along with the rise of premarital and non-marriage practices such as dating and cohabitation, has transformed intimacy in contemporary Iran, leading to significant changes in gender relations and family structure.
At Brown University, Babadi is working on the publication of his first book manuscript based on his dissertation research, as well as writing two articles on Iranian cinema. Additionally, he teaches a course on the Ethics and Politics of Intimacy in the Middle East and another on the Aesthetics and Politics of Iranian Cinema.
Orwa Switat is an urban planning scholar with degrees in philosophy, political science and urban planning. He focuses on the status of groups in planning theory and practice. He has been a Religion and Public Life Fellow in Conflict and Peace at Harvard Divinity School and a visiting scholar in the Department of Urban and Environmental Policy and Planning at Tufts University. Switat has extensive experience promoting spatial justice and heritage preservation among Palestinian communities.
In his research, he integrates digitization and visualization with discourse and planning analysis to uncover hidden histories, restore lost heritages, spatialize oral histories, visualize counter-hegemonic narratives and develop innovative restorative planning approaches.
Gabriel Young joins CMES as the Alomran Family Postdoctoral Research Associate in Middle East Studies. Gabriel is a social historian of twentieth-century Iraq and the Persian Gulf, with a research and teaching focus on state formation, agrarian change and resource extraction. His book project explores the relationship between natural resource sovereignty and political rule from the perspective of communities living along the resource frontier of Basra in southern Iraq. Gabriel's work has been published or is forthcoming in journals such as Comparative Studies in Society and History, International Labor and Working-Class History and Jadaliyya.