Sholeh Shahrokhi

Sholeh Shahrokhi is a Professor in Anthropology and the Director of the Global and Historical Studies Program at Butler University. Dr. Shahrokhi received her Ph.D. in anthropology from the University of California at Berkeley in 2008.  In the same year, she began teaching at Butler in the Department of History and Anthropology, and across interdisciplinary programs such as Gender, Women, and Sexuality Studies; Peace Studies; International Studies; and Global and Historical Studies.

Her scholarship focuses on explorations of power as manifested in an intersectional and discursive expressions of gender, race, body, age, religion and ethnicity, urbanity, as socio-cultural frames of differences. Her research projects in Iran, France, the UK, and the United States have focused on the formation of gendered norms, ideas about sexuality, and most recently on the "crisis" of refugees in Europe and the political north. Among many other topics, she has conducted research on art of/by refugees, creativity and aesthetics in political protest in Iran and across the Middle East; a gendered reading of visual politics of the body emerging from contemporary Iranian protest scene; alternative sexualities and lifestyles among young Iranians in the US; spatial claims to the city, the notion of trespass as resistance to urban violence among a category called "runaway daughters" in Tehran; contemporary trends in cosmetic surgeries, shifting ideals of masculinities, femininities, and beauty in Tehran. Her writing on Iran aims to diversify representation of the people, while remaining critical of strategies that exclude “others”.