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Behnaz Mirzai

Professor, History, Brock University
Associate Fellow

bmirzai@brocku.ca

Behnaz Mirzai is Professor of Middle Eastern history at Brock University, Canada and Senior Guest Researcher at the Bonn Centre for Dependency and Slavery Studies, University of Bonn. She was Visiting Professor at Indian Ocean World Centre, McGill university in 2024 and Visiting Professor at Unité de recherches Migrations et société URMIS, Université Côte d'Azur in 2023.

Her primary interest is the history of the Middle East in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, with a focus on former African slave communities and their relationships with other ethnic groups, as well as African-derived religious practices, various forms of African spirit-possession cults, and the transformation of these cults in Iran and the Middle East in the modern period. She has also examined the circumstances of various enslaved ethnic groups in Iran and around the Indian Ocean.
She is the author of A History of Slavery and Emancipation in Iran, 1800–1929. Her book was finalist for the 2018 Canadian Historical Association Wallace K. Ferguson Prize. It is the first systematic book and exploration wholly dedicated to slavery in Iran in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
Relying on historical and anthropological methodologies, she has conducted fieldworks in Sistan and Baluchistan, and southern provinces in Iran and produced two documentary films, Afro-Iranian Lives, and The African-Baluchi Trance Dance. The former film won the prize Special Mention at the 10th annual Zanzibar International Film Festival.
She has authored numerous articles on slavery and the African Diaspora in Iran, edited The Baluchi and Baluchistan, coedited Slavery, Islam and Diaspora, and Africa and Its Diasporas: Rethinking Struggles for Recognition and Empowerment.

Her book The Life of an Enslaved African in the Ottoman Empire and Iran: The Autobiography of Mahboob is being published by University of Toronto Press.

Keywords: African diaspora in the Middle East, Slavery in the Middle East, Afro-Iranians, Slavery in the Indian Ocean,