About
Beeta Baghoolizadeh (Bee-taa Ba-gu-lee / zaa-deh • بیتا بَقولیزاده) is a historian of memory, visuality, and race. She holds a PhD in history from the University of Pennsylvania and is currently an Associate Research Scholar at Princeton University's Sharmin and Bijan Mossavar-Rahmani Center for Iran and Persian Gulf Studies.
Her first book, The Color Black: Enslavement and Erasure in Iran, forthcoming with Duke University Press, examines race and racialization through the lens of the last decades of legal slavery and the aftermath of abolition in Iran. Although enslavement was only formally abolished in Iran in 1929, Iranians popularly deny any history of slavery, while still hanging onto racist anti-Black vestiges in their every day culture. Her work explores this cognitive dissonance through narratives of memory and erasure. Through a close examination of photography, archives, architecture, paintings, theater, written documents, and more, The Color Black not only argues that Iranians had a dynamic understanding of race and racialization during the 19th and 20th centuries, but also explains why the erasures surrounding these issues remain so pervasive. Her second book, tentatively titled The Blurring of Myth, Modernity, and Memory, examines how social and cultural shifts often attributed to “modernity” in Iran can be directly traced to the abolition of slavery. Beeta has articles forthcoming or published in Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East (CSSAAME), Lateral: Journal of the Cultural Studies Association, and American Historical Review (AHR).
Beeta’s art, “Diaspora Letters,” examines the boring and the mundane in everyday Iran and is represented by Twelve Gates Arts. She is the director of the Ajam Digital Archive, and has served as the Resident Historian for the Collective for Black Iranians.
Beeta’s work has been profiled in mainstream media including CNN, BBC Persian, The Independent, Al Jazeera English, Huck, and other global platforms, including the United Nations. Prior to joining Princeton, Beeta was an Assistant Professor of History and Critical Black Studies at Bucknell University. Her research has been supported by the Social Science Research Council (SSRC), and she has also been a Research Fellow at the Bard Graduate Center and a Regional Faculty Fellow at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wolf Humanities Center.
Her first book, The Color Black: Enslavement and Erasure in Iran, forthcoming with Duke University Press, examines race and racialization through the lens of the last decades of legal slavery and the aftermath of abolition in Iran. Although enslavement was only formally abolished in Iran in 1929, Iranians popularly deny any history of slavery, while still hanging onto racist anti-Black vestiges in their every day culture. Her work explores this cognitive dissonance through narratives of memory and erasure. Through a close examination of photography, archives, architecture, paintings, theater, written documents, and more, The Color Black not only argues that Iranians had a dynamic understanding of race and racialization during the 19th and 20th centuries, but also explains why the erasures surrounding these issues remain so pervasive. Her second book, tentatively titled The Blurring of Myth, Modernity, and Memory, examines how social and cultural shifts often attributed to “modernity” in Iran can be directly traced to the abolition of slavery. Beeta has articles forthcoming or published in Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East (CSSAAME), Lateral: Journal of the Cultural Studies Association, and American Historical Review (AHR).
Beeta’s art, “Diaspora Letters,” examines the boring and the mundane in everyday Iran and is represented by Twelve Gates Arts. She is the director of the Ajam Digital Archive, and has served as the Resident Historian for the Collective for Black Iranians.
Beeta’s work has been profiled in mainstream media including CNN, BBC Persian, The Independent, Al Jazeera English, Huck, and other global platforms, including the United Nations. Prior to joining Princeton, Beeta was an Assistant Professor of History and Critical Black Studies at Bucknell University. Her research has been supported by the Social Science Research Council (SSRC), and she has also been a Research Fellow at the Bard Graduate Center and a Regional Faculty Fellow at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wolf Humanities Center.