Ida Yalzadeh is Assistant Professor of Ethnic Studies at UC Berkeley. She is an interdisciplinary historian who thinks about the relationship between race and empire and who engages in the fields of diplomatic history, Asian American Studies, and Critical Southwest Asia and North Africa (SWANA) Studies, and more specifically, Iranian Diaspora Studies.
Her publications include articles in the journals American Quarterly, Journal of Asian American Studies, Amerasia, and Diplomatic History. She is currently at work on a book project that focuses on the racialized experience of Iranian foreign nationals from 1953 to 2001. Bridging diplomatic history and Asian American Studies, it makes the case for understanding racial projects as transnational, imperial processes with lingering legacies. Her article “After the Battle of Beverly Hills: U.S. Government Surveillance of Iranian International Students in the Cold War” provides a glimpse into the book’s arguments and significance. In addition to her academic writing, she is also a public scholar who has written for the Washington Post. She earned her Ph.D. in American Studies at Brown University and was previously a Postdoctoral Fellow at Harvard University and an assistant professor of history at Lehigh University.
