Professor Afsaneh Najmabadi's new book will be released this spring by Duke University Press. Her book, Familial Undercurrents: Untold Stories of Love and Marriage in Modern Iran, explores "her family’s complex experiences of polygamous marriage to tell a larger story of the transformations of notions of love, marriage, and family life in mid-twentieth-century Iran." 

Professor Najmabadi is the author of Women with Mustaches and Men without Beards: Gender and Sexual Anxieties of Iranian Modernity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), which received the 2005 Joan Kelly Memorial Prize from the American Historical Association. Along with Gail Hershatter of University of California, Santa Cruz, she is one of only two historians to win the prize twice. She has also authored Professing Selves: Transsexuality and Same-Sex Desire in Contemporary Iran (Duke University Press, 2013), which was a finalist for Lambda Literary Award in 2014.

We congratulate Professor Najmabadi on this publication! 

Reviews 

“Afsaneh Najmabadi’s creative mélange of history and memoir makes a compelling case for microhistory and even more specifically for personal history as a living document and an archive to be explored in uncovering Iranian social history. I greatly appreciate how Najmabadi has brought history to life.” - Firoozeh Kashani-Sabet, author of Conceiving Citizens: Women and the Politics of Motherhood in Iran

“Few scholars elevate the personal to the theoretical with the economy and elegance of Afsaneh Najmabadi. She translates a claim that her father had a secret second family into a journey of research, producing exquisite reflections on urban/space transformations that facilitated familial change. Stories are not just stories, as Najmabadi interrogates them to extract and advance their enduring theoretical significance. She sweeps into history and history making.” — Suad Joseph, general editor of the Encyclopedia of Women and Islamic Cultures