Office: 2.43, 13 Woodland Road

Email: mattin.biglari@bristol.ac.uk

My research focuses on the intersection of energy, environment, infrastructure and labour, especially in the history of Iran and the Middle East. My forthcoming monograph, coming out with Edinburgh University Press, is titled Nationalising Oil & Knowledge in Iran: Labour, Decolonisation and Colonial Modernity, 1933-51. This is adapted from my doctoral thesis, which was awarded the 2021 BRISMES Leigh Douglas Memorial Prize. Engaging with STS, subaltern studies, global labour history, and the energy humanities, it argues that Iran’s oil nationalisation in 1951 stemmed from years of mundane struggles relating to technopolitics in the city of Abadan, especially in the oil refinery, training centres, and urban space. It illuminates how anti-colonialism, infrastructural politics and labour activism coalesced in opposition to the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (now known as BP), and how this process culminated in the reproduction of colonial epistemologies, separating the technology and politics of oil.

My current research engages with energy/environmental humanities from a postcolonial perspective, focusing on the proliferation of oil refining across the Indian Ocean during the ‘Great Acceleration.’ I am also undertaking research for this project as an Alexander von Humboldt in the Environment and Justice research unit at the ZMO in Berlin. On the one hand, this project will ask how multinational oil companies negotiated local entanglements when faced with growing anti-colonialism and postcolonial aspirations, especially learning the lessons of Iranian oil nationalisation. On the other, it examines the extent to which these new refineries raised issues of pollution, toxicity and environmental justice for local populations, and how these figured in the decolonisation project on the ground. Alongside this, I am comparatively exploring visual cultures of oil through the research group Oil Cultures of the Middle East and Latin America (OCMELA). I am also interested in histories of capitalism and race in the Middle East and Indian Ocean world through my involvement in the SOAS Walter Rodney Collective.

Previously I have written about banditry in Iran during the early twentieth century, examining its relationship to the country’s constitutional revolution and integration into the capitalist world economy. I have also published an article in Diplomatic History about how perceptions of Shi’a Islam as a religion of protest shaped U.S. foreign policy during the 1978-79 Iranian revolution, contextualised within the wider international history of the Global Cold War.

Previously, I was a postdoctoral reseacher at SOAS, University of London, where I also completed my PhD and an MA in Near and Middle Eastern Studies. I also attained a BA in History at the University of Cambridge.

Teaching

At Bristol, I am currently teaching on the following modules: Asia in Global Perspective; Approaching the Past; Environment and History (MA); Politics of the Past; and Decolonisation.

I welcome any BA/MA dissertation projects relating to the following areas: history of the modern Middle East; global environmental history; energy history/humanities; global labour history; histories of capitalism; histories of science and technology; histories of development.