About
Beeta Baghoolizadeh (Bee-taa Ba-gu-lee / zaa-deh • بیتا بَقولیزاده) holds a PhD in History from the University of Pennsylvania and is Associate Research Scholar at Columbia University’s Middle East Institute, where she is writing her second book on the supernatural and questions of humanity.
Her first book, The Color Black: Enslavement and Erasure in Iran (Duke University Press, 2024) examines questions concerning race, gender, media, and visuality through the lens of enslavement and abolition in the 19th and 20th centuries. The book traces the enslavement of East Africans in domestic and royal spaces during the nineteenth century and the aftermath of abolition in Iran. Although enslavement was only formally abolished in Iran in 1929, Iranians popularly deny its history while still hanging onto racist anti-Black vestiges. Through a close examination of photography, archives, architecture, paintings, theater, written documents, and more, The Color Black unearths an intentionally hidden history within both institutional spaces and collective memory and documents how the politics of visibility framed discussions around enslavement and abolition during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The Color Black has received the Wesley-Logan Book Prize in African Diaspora History from the American Historical Association (AHA), the Paul E. Lovejoy Book Prize from the Journal of Global Slavery, and the Scholars of Color First Book Award from Duke University Press.
Beeta's scholarship has been published in the American Historical Review (AHR), Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East (CSSAAME), and Lateral: Journal of the Cultural Studies Association. Her work has been profiled in mainstream media including CNN, BBC Persian, The Independent, Al Jazeera English, Huck, and she has been invited to share her expertise at the United Nations. Beeta draws upon interdisciplinary methods to explore themes in her work, and her visual art is represented by 12Gates Arts. Prior to joining Columbia, Beeta was an Associate Research Scholar at Princeton’s Mossavar-Rahmani Center for Iran and Persian Gulf Studies and an Assistant Professor of History and Critical Black Studies at Bucknell University. She has also held fellowships as a researcher at the Bard Graduate Center and as a Regional Faculty Fellow at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wolf Humanities Center, and her research has been supported by the Social Science Research Council (SSRC).
Her first book, The Color Black: Enslavement and Erasure in Iran (Duke University Press, 2024) examines questions concerning race, gender, media, and visuality through the lens of enslavement and abolition in the 19th and 20th centuries. The book traces the enslavement of East Africans in domestic and royal spaces during the nineteenth century and the aftermath of abolition in Iran. Although enslavement was only formally abolished in Iran in 1929, Iranians popularly deny its history while still hanging onto racist anti-Black vestiges. Through a close examination of photography, archives, architecture, paintings, theater, written documents, and more, The Color Black unearths an intentionally hidden history within both institutional spaces and collective memory and documents how the politics of visibility framed discussions around enslavement and abolition during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The Color Black has received the Wesley-Logan Book Prize in African Diaspora History from the American Historical Association (AHA), the Paul E. Lovejoy Book Prize from the Journal of Global Slavery, and the Scholars of Color First Book Award from Duke University Press.
Beeta's scholarship has been published in the American Historical Review (AHR), Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East (CSSAAME), and Lateral: Journal of the Cultural Studies Association. Her work has been profiled in mainstream media including CNN, BBC Persian, The Independent, Al Jazeera English, Huck, and she has been invited to share her expertise at the United Nations. Beeta draws upon interdisciplinary methods to explore themes in her work, and her visual art is represented by 12Gates Arts. Prior to joining Columbia, Beeta was an Associate Research Scholar at Princeton’s Mossavar-Rahmani Center for Iran and Persian Gulf Studies and an Assistant Professor of History and Critical Black Studies at Bucknell University. She has also held fellowships as a researcher at the Bard Graduate Center and as a Regional Faculty Fellow at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wolf Humanities Center, and her research has been supported by the Social Science Research Council (SSRC).