I have a PhD in sociology from the University of California at Berkeley. Prior to joining the Gender Studies Department at LSE, I had held positions in various international settings such as Syracuse University, Lund University, the Harvard Academy for International and Area Studies, and the American University of Beirut. I am currently on the Executive Board of the International Sociological Association, and serve on the Editorial Board of the Journal of Middle Eastern Women's Studies.

My research interests fall at the intersection of gender politics, feminist geography, and ethnographies of the state in Iran, the Middle East, and beyond. I bring a critical lens and an ethnographic approach to the study of gendered public spaces and spheres, the reconstruction of gender difference in city spaces, and the complex gendered underpinnings of urban governance and political institutions.

My published work, can be situated in three inter-connected research clusters:

• The intersection of the politics of space and gender with the “pragmatics” of statehood in the Islamic republic of Iran

This is the topic of a number of articles, past and forthcoming and of my book, Women in Place: The Politics of Gender Segregation in Iran (University of California Press, 2019).

• Gendered mobility and its relationship to different social realities and modalities of power

Although partly overlapping with my interest in gendered geographies of exclusion, my research in this area is more explicitly transregional and comparative. This interest has led to a coauthored piece that constitutes an attempt to break the walls of regional studies: “Patriarchal Accommodations: Women’s Mobility and the Policies of Gender Difference from Urban Tehran to Migrant Mexico,” Journal of Contemporary Ethnography 43 (2)

Similarly, transregional in emphasis and focused on women’s mobility is my planned second book Gendered Mobility and the Shifting Articulations of Street Harassment, which is a multi-national transregional study of women only public transportation across the globe.

• Gendered paths to urban governance and political representation

This is an emerging research interest that has led me to zoom in on the gendered processes of urban policymaking by addressing the following questions: Who gets to participate in the articulation and implementation of policies? How does gender (together with class and race) shape women’s access to, and presence in, political office? And how does it inform their governance strategies?