Just as sugar defined the 18th century, and cotton and coal the 19th century, oil has been the defining commodity of the 20th century. Its historical, as well as its contemporary role in forging modern capitalism is often reduced to its (geo)political and economic aspects. Working within the emerging field of energy humanities, Peyman Jafari’s research is focused on retrieving the social and cultural entanglements of oil and modernity and reconnecting them with the state and the economy. In this lecture, Jafari recasts the history of oil through the exploration of oil workers’ activism during the transformative moments in 20th century Iran, with a particular focus on the Iranian Revolution.

Dr. Peyman Jafari has an MA degree in political science from the University of Amsterdam and a PhD degree in history from Leiden University, where he wrote his dissertation on Oil, Labor and Revolution: A Social History of Labor in the Iranian Oil Industry, 1973-83. His research is focused on energy history, labor history, social movements, revolutions and political economy. He is the author of Der andere Iran: Geschichte und Kultur von 1900 bis zur Gegenwart [The other Iran: History and Culture from 1900 till Today] (München, 2010), and a co-editor of Iran in the Middle East: Transnational Encounters and Social History (London, 2015).

Jafari has been a visiting scholar at SOAS (London) and Columbia University (New York). He is currently an associate research scholar with the Sharmin and Bijan   Mossavar-Rahmani Center for Iran and Persian Gulf Studies at Princeton University, where he is writing a book on the history of state, capital and labor in the Iranian oil industry from 1973 to 2013.