PhD research

The social history of labor in the Iranian oil industry (1908-1954)

This PhD research sets out to unravel and explain the socio-structural and cultural impacts of oil-industrialization on the local Bakhtiari community in general and the industrial laborers it provided in specific. It will do so by analyzing and re-construing, on one hand, the social, economic, occupational, cultural and political changes which fundamentally transformed their pre-industrial and nomadic mode of life into an industrially urban one and, on the other hand, by tracing and examining the unique agencies that these laborers employed and displayed in the context of these alterations. 

This research’s point of departure will be the discovery of the first oil-well in the history of the Middle East in the Iranian city of Masjed-i-Soliman in 1908 and arrives at its final destination, which is the 1953 Anglo-American  coup d’état against Prime Minister Dr. Mohammad Mossadeq, two years after his government had successfully nationalized Iranian oil at the expense of the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company.

CV

-  2006 Bachelor degree in ‘Marketing’ 
Inholland University 
Faculty of Economy 

-  2010 Master degree in ‘Cultural Anthropology’ 
University Utrecht 
Faculty of Social and Behavioural Sciences