Dr Yasamin Alkhansa

Independent Scholar Fellow 2023-24

State Histories: Politics of Teaching the Past in Iran

This research comes at a time when historical revisionism is on the rise. Contributing to the growing recognition of the uses and misuses of history in authoritarian contexts, this work offers unique insights into the complexities of such attempts in Iran under the Pahlavi and Islamic Republic. It historicises official narratives of the past as constructed in schoolbooks and traces their change since the 1920s. It conceptualises history textbooks as the state's autobiography, implicated in the struggles for legitimacy and central to the production of political myths. Yasamin's monograph is in press by Palgrave Macmillan/ Springer Nature as part of its series on Iranian Politics.

More information

Areas of interest

Education Ethnography Iran

Cohort

ISF10

Biography

Yasamin Alkhansa holds a PhD in International Education from the University of Sussex, Brighton, United Kingdom. She has been researching education as it is implicated in the formation of nations/states and how it contributes to the contested narratives of the past. For her ethnography of official history in schools in Iran, Yasamin received the British Educational Research Association’s (BERA) Doctoral Thesis Award in 2019 and has since worked in different European institutes such as Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS) in France, and George Eckert Institute for Educational Media (GEI) and Leibniz Research Association in Germany. She is currently a visiting scholar at the University of St. Andrews, Scotland where she is writing her first monograph on the politics of State-sponsored history supported by ISRF.

Biographical details correct as of 14.01.25