Fatemeh Sadeghi

Fatemeh Sadeghi serves as a Research Fellow at the UCL Institute for Global Prosperity, University College London, where she leads work under the ERC-funded TAKHAYYUL project examining imaginative landscapes of Islamist politics. Previously, she held an O'Brien Research Fellowship at McGill University's Faculty of Law from 2018-2020.

Her educational background includes a PhD in Political Science from Tarbiat Modares University (1998-2004) with dissertation research on Gender and Power in the Ethical Doctrines from the Third to the Ninth Century Iran, supervised by Dr. Hatam Ghaderi and advised by Dr. Mohsen Kadivar and Dr. Katayoon Mazdapour.

Specializing in political thought and imagination, Sadeghi's research explores how historical narratives legitimize power claims in contemporary Iran through nostalgia, selective memory, and reinterpretation of the past. Her work spans feminist theories, gender politics, Islamic law, constitutionalism, and Zoroastrian jurisprudential doctrines, with particular focus on unveiling campaigns under Pahlavi rule and compulsory hijab enforcement in the Islamic Republic. She examines the intersection of religious law with theories of sovereignty in Muslim contexts through both historical and contemporary lenses.

Recent publications reveal an evolving trajectory from foundational studies on Zoroastrian-Islamic legal interrelations toward contemporary analyses of social policing, resistance movements, and constitutional theocracy in Iran. Her 2024 work centers on ethnographic methodology in Global South contexts and resilient resistance in Iranian households, while 2023 publications address Vali-e Faqih doctrine, counter-revolutionary states, and grassroots messianism. This progression demonstrates increasing engagement with lived experiences of political imagination under authoritarianism.

Sadeghi actively contributes to academic discourse through editorial roles including co-lead of IGP working papers and Deputy Editor for the Manchester Journal of Transnational Islamic Law and Practice. Her teaching portfolio spans undergraduate and postgraduate courses on Middle East history, Islamic feminism, populist politics, and protest movements at institutions including UCL, University of Freiburg, and Vassar College.

Her research team operates within the TAKHAYYUL project framework, developing alternative imaginaries for feminist transformative politics in the Global South. Current work examines how subaltern women deploy political haya (modesty) as moral resistance against state authority in Iran, building on her longstanding investigation of political imagination as historically constructed intersubjective phenomenon.