Dr Assef Ashraf
- Associate Professor in the Eastern Islamic Lands and Persian-Speaking World
- Postgraduate Coordinator, Middle Eastern Studies
- Director of Studies and Undergraduate Tutor, Pembroke College
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About
Assef Ashraf is a historian of early modern and modern Iran and the Persianate world.
He received his BA in Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies from NYU, where he studied Arabic and Persian, and spent a year abroad in Cairo. After completing his BA, he worked at Human Rights Watch for three years, before returning to study an MA and PhD in History at Yale. He taught for two years at Bryn Mawr College and then came to Cambridge.
His first book, Making and Remaking Empire in Early Qajar Iran (Cambridge, 2024), focused on the concepts and practices that helped construct Qajar political authority over time. The book was a finalist for the British-Kuwaiti Friendship Society Prize for best book in Middle Eastern Studies. He is also the co-editor of The Persianate World: Rethinking a Shared Space (Brill, 2019).
He is currently working on two projects: a conceptual history of justice in Persian political thought, and a history of the translation movement in nineteenth-century Iran.
Research
Research interests
- Iranian History
- Persianate History
- Comparative empires
- Intellectual History and the History of Political Thought
Teaching and supervision
Dr Ashraf teaches Iranian and Persianate history across a range of undergraduate papers.
He is also the postgraduate coordinator in Middle Eastern Studies, and convenes the core module on Theory and Method in Middle Eastern Studies for MPhil and first-year PhD students.
Dr Ashraf welcomes inquiries from prospective Master’s and PhD students who are interested in the history of Iran and the Persianate world, from the medieval to modern periods, broadly defined.