Zeinab Azarbadegan

Zeinab Azarbadegan's picture
Assistant Professor of History
zeinab.azarbadegan@yale.edu
Office: 
HQ 263
Fields of interest: 

19th Century Middle East; Ottoman Empire; Iraq; histories of empire and inter-imperial relations; histories of science, technology (esp. print and photography), and medicine; Muslim pilgrimage

Bio: 
Zeinab Azarbadegan is an assistant professor of history of the modern Middle East. She received her degree in International and Global History from Columbia University; her dissertation won the inaugural Howard and Natalie Shawn Prize (2021) for the best dissertation in political history since 1800. Prior to Yale, she was a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow (2022-2025) and a postdoctoral research fellow at the Vienna School of International Studies (2021-2022). 
 
Azarbadegan’s first book examines Ottoman-Qajar relations in nineteenth century Ottoman Iraq and how scientific knowledge production became the main tool for asserting sovereignty in the emerging global order. She is also working on a second monograph-length project which studies the question of imperial subjecthood and citizenship in the same space.  
Azarbadegan’s work has been supported by a number of fellowships including the Sakıp Sabancı Center Dissertation Fellowship at Columbia University. She has published extensively on geographic and archeological knowledge production in Ottoman and Qajar Empires, and has been awarded the Best Paper Delivered (2025) by the International Society for the History of the Map (ISHMAP). 
 
Azarbadegan is a long-time producer at the Ottoman History Podcast and a co-curator of the Palestine From Above Exhibition at the Qattan Foundation (Sep 2021-Jan 2022) and ANAMED (Mar 2025-Jan 2026). She has been a lead contributor and cataloguer at the Manuscripts of the Muslim World Project (MWM) at Columbia’s Rare Book and Manuscript Library, funded by the Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR) and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and a researcher and translator at the Leverhulme Balkh Art and Cultural Heritage Project at the Orient Institute in University of Oxford.  
At Yale, she teaches courses on Ottoman history, modern Middle Eastern history, global histories of commodities and technologies, and empire. Please check courses.yale.edu for current offerings. 
 
Publications 
“Eurasian Worlds Interrupted: Shi’i Religious Networks after Russia’s Conquest of the South Caucasus,” in Eileen Kane, Masha Kirasirova, and Margaret Litvin (eds.), Russian-Arab Worlds: A Documentary History, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2023).
 
“Ottomans and Iranians at Ctesiphon,” Journal of the Ottoman and Turkish Studies Association 8:1 (2021): 377-386. 
 
With Zeynep Çelik “Late Ottoman Visions of Palestine: Railroads, Maps, and Aerial Photography,” Jerusalem Quarterly 82 (2020): 87-109. 
 
“Imagined Geographies, Re-invented Histories: Ottoman Iraq as Part of Iran,” Journal of the Ottoman and Turkish Studies Association. 5 (2018): 115-141.
Period: 
Modern
Geography: 
Global/International
Middle East
Thematic: 
Comparative
Empires & Colonialism
Intellectual
Political
Spatial/Geographic