Sep 29 – Connected Histories: The Gulf States, Iran, and the Indian Ocean with Noora Lori, Houchang Chehabi and Sunil Sharma
Tuesday, Sep 29, 2026
4:30pm-6pm
121 Bay State Road, Boston
Please register here.
This discussion will examine how modern state-building fragmented the Gulf and Indian Ocean’s pre-modern cosmopolitanism. Speakers will trace the Kingdom of Hormuz, historical cross-Gulf migrations between Iran and the Arabian Peninsula.
Speakers:
Houchang E. Chehabi is Professor Emeritus of International Relations and History at the BU Pardee School of Global Studies. He also taught at Harvard and was a visiting professor at the University of St. Andrews, UCLA, and the Universidad Argentina de la Empresa. He has published three monographs: Iranian Politics and Religious Modernism: The Liberation Movement of Iran under the Shah and Khomeini (1990), Culture Wars and Dual Society in Iran (2018), and Onomastic Reform: Family Names and State Building in Iran (2020). He has also edited or co-edited a dozen volumes, most notably Sultanistic Regimes (1998), Distant Relations: Iran and Lebanon in the Last 500 Years (2006), Iran’s Constitutional Revolution: Popular Politics, Cultural Transformations, and Transnational Connections (2010), and Unconquered States: Non-European Powers in the Imperial Age (2024). Professor Chehabi’s areas of expertise include Iranian history, island studies, and international law.
Lori is Associate Professor of International Relations at the Frederick S. Pardee School of Global Studies and Associate Professor of Political Science at Boston University. She also serves as Faculty Fellow for Graduate Affairs in the Office of the Provost and as Director of the Middle East and North Africa Initiative. Her research focuses on migration, citizenship, and the politics of the Middle East. She is the author of the award-winning book Offshore Citizens: Permanent “Temporary” Status in the Gulf and is currently working on her second book, Passport Power: Hierarchy, Insecurity, and the Global Citizenship Market.
Moderator:
Sunil Sharma is Director of the BU Center for the Study of Asia and Boston University, Department of Modern Languages & Comparative Literature Professor of Persianate & Comparative Literature.
As a humanist, Professor Sunil Sharma is passionate about the role of literary and artistic cultures to enrich and empower the lives of people, a belief that inspires his teaching and research. The overarching theme in his scholarship is the study of historical cross-cultural encounters and intellectual exchange that have led to innovations in Persianate societies, particularly in South Asia, across an entire millennium. A prolific writer, Sharma has written several articles and books, including Mughal Arcadia: Persian Poetry in an Indian Court, which explores the aesthetic representations of idyllic spaces in cities and nature in the early modern poetic imaginary and Amir Khusraw: The Poet of Sultans and Sufis, which synthesizes the sacred and profane. His study of autobiography and travel writing by women who contributed to the advent of modernity resulted in two collaborative projects — Atiya’s Journeys: From Colonial Bombay to Edwardian England and an anthology of translations, Three Centuries of Travel Writing by Muslim Women. An intrepid traveler himself, Professor Sharma has visited parts of West Asia and the Caucasus, several countries in South Asia, Southeast Asia, and East Asia; Central Asia is on his itinerary for this summer.