معرفی
Dr. Assef Ashraf is an Associate Professor in the Eastern Islamic Lands and Persian-Speaking World at the University of Cambridge's Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies. He holds fellowships at Pembroke College and serves as Director of Studies there. His research focuses on early modern and modern Iranian history, political culture, and the Persianate world. Key works include Making and Remaking Empire in Early Qajar Iran (2024) and co-editing The Persianate World: Rethinking a Shared Sphere (2019). He lectures on Iranian, Middle Eastern, and Persian-speaking world history, and supervises graduate students in these fields.
Research interests include comparative empires, political thought, and the use of historical memory for political purposes. Current PhD advisees explore topics like Gulf state formation, Ilkhanid intellectual networks, and Iranian conceptualizations of decline. Dr. Ashraf’s work has appeared in journals such as Comparative Studies in Society and History and International Journal of Middle Eastern Studies.
He obtained his PhD from Yale University before joining Cambridge in 2018. Ongoing projects include co-editing the Cambridge Companion to Qajar Iran.
