Department of History, School of History, Religions & Philosophies
Senior Teaching Fellow
School of History, Religions and Philosophies
Senior Teaching Fellow
- Name:
- Mr Mattin Biglari
- Email address:
- mb125@soas.ac.uk
- Address:
- SOAS University of London
Thornhaugh Street, Russell Square, London WC1H 0XG - Building:
- Russell Square: College Buildings
- Office No:
- 481
- Academic Support Hours:
- Tuesday 2:00-3:00pm
- Thesis title:
- 'Refining Knowledge: Expertise, Labour and Everyday Life in the Iranian Oil Industry, c. 1933-51.
- Year of Study:
- 3
PhD Research
In my thesis I examine the place of expertise in the history of the Iranian oil industry. I do so by focusing on the operations of the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (AIOC) in the oil refinery town of Abadan, south-west Iran, especially from c. 1933 up until the Iranian government’s nationalisation of oil in 1951. I follow various actors, including workers, students, engineers, managers, journalists, politicians, machines and oil itself as they were bound up in the process by which oil expertise was produced. While I pay special attention to the interplay of these actors in the Abadan refinery, I also examine other spaces, such as Abadan Town and AIOC’s training centres. By revealing the ways in which expertise figured in the daily lives of oil workers, students and managers, I show how these experiences contributed to shaping wider politics on local, national and global scales.
Publications
- “Captive to the Demonology of the Iranian Mobs”: U.S. Foreign Policy and Perceptions of Shi’a Islam During the Iranian Revolution, 1978-79', Diplomatic History 40, 4 (Sept., 2016): 579-605.
- ‘Abadan in the National Press During the Oil Nationalisation Movement, 1946-51’, Abadan: Retold, 2016.
- A State of 'Tribal Lawlessness'? Rural and Urban Crime in Fars Province, 1910-1915’, in Crime, Poverty and Survival in the Middle East and North Africa: The ‘Dangerous Classes’ since 1800, ed. Stephanie Cronin (London: I. B. Tauris, 2020), 117-34.
Conferences
- Conference co-convener: ‘Energy, Culture and Society in the Global South’, at CRASSH, University of Cambridge, 31 May – 1 June 2019.