Shahrzad Mojab

Shahrzad Mojab is an Iranian professor at the University of Toronto. She teaches at the Department of Adult Education and Counselling Psychology and the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education at the University of Toronto.

Education and career

Mojab was born in Shiraz. She obtained her Bachelor of Arts in 1977 in Iran in the English language; her Master of Arts in Comparative Education and Administration, Higher and Continuing Education in 1979 and her Ph.D. in Educational Policy Studies and Women's Studies in 1991 both at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

She then returned to Iran after the Iranian revolution and spent four years from 1979 to 1983 in the country. She became active in the women’s movement and the social movements of Kurdistan. She escaped from Iran in 1983 with her lifelong partner Amir Hassanpour and her son, and sought refuge in Canada as a political refugee. Since 1986 she has been living in Canada with her partner and her son. Before joining the University of Toronto in 1996, she taught and worked at the University of Windsor, Ryerson University and at Concordia University.

Research

Mojab's areas of research and teaching include educational policy studies; gender, state, diaspora and transnationality; women, war, militarization and violence; women, war and learning; women political prisoners in the Middle East; transnational women's organizations; feminism, anti-racism, colonialism and imperialism; Marxist-feminism and learning; adult education in comparative and global perspectives. Mojab's research has been published on Islamic feminism, minority women in academe, diversity and academic freedom in Canadian and Iranian universities, adult education and civil society in the Middle East, feminism and nationalism, state-university relation, and women's access to higher education.

These works have been published in various book chapters, and periodicals such as International Journal of Lifelong long Education; Feminist Review; Canadian Woman Studies Journal; Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies; Journal of Ethnicities; Resources for Feminist Research; The Canadian Journal for the Study of Adult Education; Adult Education Quarterly: A Journal of Research and Theory; Studies in Continuing Education; Al-Raida Magazine (Institute for Women’s Studies in the Arab World); Pakistan Journal of Women’s Studies: Alam-e-Niswan; Journal of Race, Gender, and Class; and Atlantis: A Women’s Studies Journal. Together with Shahrzad Arshadi [1], Mojab has produced two documentaries; the first Samjana: Memoirs and Resistance, originally released in 2007, is about women in post-war Nepal, and their role in the peace process, as well as the role of women's NGOs in building sustainable peace. The second documentary Dancing of Defiance: Kurdish Women, to be released in 2009 is about Mojab's research with Kurdish women, and their work toward socialism and secularism.

Mojab's current projects also include two research websites to be used as archival space for relevant resource for the research and as a tool for the dissemination of knowledge. The websites include "Women, War, Diaspora and Learning" and Memories, Memoirs, and the Arts: Women Political Prisoners of Iran.

She is the co-editor of Women of Iran: A Subject bibliography and Two Decades of Iranian Women's Studies in Exiles: A Subject Bibliography which was published in Persian. She is also the editor of the first collection of academic studies on Kurdish women entitled Women of A Non-State Nation: The Kurds, which was written in English and then translated into Turkish and Kurdish, and the co-editor of and contributor to Of Property and Propriety: The Role of Gender and Class in Imperialism and Nationalism and Violence in the Name of Honour: Theoretical and Political Challenges.

Awards and positions

Mojab was the former director of the Women and Gender Institute at the University of Toronto (2003–2008), and the past-president of the Canadian Association for the Studies of Adult Education. In 2008 she won the Distinguished Contribution to Graduate Teaching Award at the University of Toronto; in 2006 she was named Noted Scholar in the Faculty of Education from the University of British Columbia; and in 2003 she was recognized as Distinguished Visitor at the University of Alberta. Mojab was the first prize winner in the 2003 Women’s World writing contest for her work, "Women’s Voices in War Zones", organized by The Women's World Organization for Rights, Literature and Development, a global network of feminist writers.

Books

• Mojab, Shahrzad; Hojabri, A, eds (2000). Women of Iran: A Subject bibliography. Cambridge, MA: Iranian Women's Studies Foundation. ISBN 0-9701413-0-0. 
• Mojab, Shahrzad, ed (2001). Women of a Non-State Nation: The Kurds. Translated into Turkish by Fahriye Adsay, Sema Kiliç, and Ekin Uşaklı. Costa Mesa, California: MAZDA Publishers. ISBN 1-56859-093-8. 
• Mojab, Shahrzad; Abdo, N., eds (2004). Violence in the Name of Honour: Theoretical and Political Challenges. Istanbul: Bilgi University Press. ISBN 975-6857-98-6. 
• Mojab, Shahrzad; Hojabri, A, eds (2000) (in Persian). Two Decades of Iranian Women's Studies in Exiles: A Subject Bibliography. Cambridge, MA: Iranian Women's Studies Foundation. 
• Bannerji, H.; Mojab, Shahrzad; Whitehead, J., eds (2001). Of Property and Propriety: The Role of Gender and Class in Imperialism and Nationalism. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. 
• Mojab, Shahrzad (2004). Violence in the Name of Honour: Theoretical and Political Challenges. Bilgi University Press. 

External links

• Shahrzad Mojab, University of Toronto.
• Kurdish Women Research Resources.
• In Memory of Fadime Sahindal: Thoughts on the Struggle Against “Honour Killing”, By Shahrzad Mojab and Amir Hassanpour.
• The dangers of Iran's Holocaust denial, By Amir Hassanpour and Shahrzad Mojab, Toronto Star.
• State-University Power Struggle at Times of Revolution and War in Iran - Boston College