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 monograph, published in 2025 by Edinburgh University Press, is titled Nationalising Oil & Knowledge in Iran: Labour, Decolonisation and Colonial Modernity, 1933-51. This is based on 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 project engages with energy/environmental humanities from a postcolonial perspective, focuses on the proliferation of oil refining across the Indian Ocean and its relationship to decolonisation, environmental justice, and the 'Great Acceleration’. I am also undertaking research for this project as an Alexander von Humboldt fellow at the ZMO in Berlin. This begins with a focus on the construction of the Aden oil refinery in the 1950s, exploring the relationship between toxicity and visuality. In particular, it examines how occularcentric environmental imaginaries of oil companies underpinned environmental and epistemic violence to fishing communities, causing toxic contamination to both 'natural' and 'supernatural' worlds. Alongside this, I am comparatively exploring visual cultures of oil infrastructure, especially industrial film and photography, 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 run a third year special subject titled 'Iran, 1901-1951: Oil, Racial Capitalism, and Decolonisation', and also contribute to 'Asia in Global Perspective', 'Capitalism', 'Themes in the History of Colonialism', 'Environment and History', as well as the MA in Environmental Humanities.

I welcome any dissertation projects relating to the following areas: modern Middle East, especially decolonisation; global environmental history; energy history/humanities; global labour history; histories of capitalism/development; histories of science, technology and infrastructure; visual cultures, especially industrial film and photography; music and counterculture/decolonisation.