Event

Event Overview

Join us for a book talk with Professor Farzin Vejdani, to discuss his latest book Private Sins, Public Crimes: Policing, Punishment, and Authority in Iran.

Drawing on a rich array of primary sources in multiple languages, Dr. Vejdani presents a pathbreaking study of the legal and social history of crime and punishment in Iran. The book offers a nuanced exploration of these dynamics within their broader historical context, particularly the interaction between Islamic law and Iranian imperial traditions, to shed light on the realities of how law was lived and experienced in the everyday life of Qajar Iran. The discussion will be moderated by Salma Waheedi,  Executive Director of the Program on Law and Society in the Muslim World at Harvard Law School.

Lunch will be provided.

This event is sponsored by the Program on Law and Society in the Muslim World at Harvard Law School and Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal Islamic Studies Program at Harvard University.

About the Speaker:

Farzin Vejdani is an Associate Professor of Middle Eastern History at Toronto Metropolitan University, where he teaches courses on the history of Muslim societies, the modern Middle East, the Ottoman Empire, the Mughal Empire, and Middle Eastern and North African cities. He was a Visiting Fellow at Massey College (2021-2022) and a Visiting Fellow at Harvard Law School’s Program on Law and Society in the Muslim World (2019-2020). His book, Private Sins, Public Crimes: Policing, Punishment, and Authority in Iran, was recently published by Yale University Press (2024). His first book, Making History in Iran: Education, Nationalism, and Print Culture(Stanford University Press, 2014) received an Honorable Mention for the Houshang Pourshariati Iranian Studies Book Award in 2016. In his other publications, Dr. Vejdani has explored the themes of everyday crime and punishment, folklore, transnational Persian print networks, and connected histories of the Ottoman Empire, India, and Iran. In addition to being the author of several book chapters, he has published numerous articles in Comparative Studies in Society and History, Journal of Social History, the International Journal of Middle East Studies, the Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient, the Journal of Religious History, the Journal of Iranian Studies, the Journal of Persianate Studies, the International Journal of Turkish Studies, the British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies, and Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East. He is also the co-editor of Iran Facing Others: Identity Boundaries in a Historical Perspective (2012).