Touraj Atabaki

Touraj Atabaki
Touraj Atabaki, Iranian scholar
Born	(1950-02-23) 23 February 1950 Tehran, Iran
Citizenship	Iranian–Dutch
Academic background
Education	National University of Iran University of London Utrecht University
Thesis	Ethnicity and Autonomy in Iranian Azarbayjan: the Autonomous government of Azarbayjan 1946 (1991)
Doctoral advisor	Ervand Abrahamian
Academic work
Discipline	Social history
Institutions	Utrecht University International Institute of Social History University of Amsterdam Leiden University
Website	iisg.amsterdam/nl/node/323

Touraj Atabaki (Persian: تورج اتابکی, born February 23, 1950) is Emeritus Professor of Social History of the Middle East and Central Asia at Leiden University.^[1] He has been the Senior Research Fellow at the International Institute of Social History in Amsterdam.^[2] He was former president of the Association for Iranian Studies^[3] and the European Society for Central Asian Studies.^[2]

Atabaki earned his doctorate from Utrecht University in 1991 with a dissertation titled Ethnicity and autonomy in Iranian Azarbayjan: the autonomous government of Azarbayjan 1946.^[4]

His book Toiling for Oil. A Social History of Petroleum in Iran (Cambridge University Press, 20245) was the winner of the British-Kuwait Friendship Society Book Prize in Middle Eastern Studies (2025), and El Grand Continent selected it as one of the 10th must-read books (2025).^[2]

Books

Atabaki's books include:

• Iranian Exiles and Stalin’s Great Terror. State Violence in the 1930s Soviet Union, co-authored: Lana Ravandi-Fadai (Edinburgh University Press, 2026)
• Toiling for Oil. A Social History of Petroleum in Iran (Cambridge University Press, 2025)
• Fada'i Guerrilla Praxis in Iran, 1970 - 1979: Narratives and Reflections on Everyday Life, co-authored: Nasser Mohajer (Bloomsbury Publishing PLC, 2025)
• Iran in the 20th Century: Historiography and Political Culture (I. B. Tauris, 2009)
• The State and the Subaltern: Modernization, Society and the State in Turkey and Iran (I. B. Tauris, 2007)
• Iran and the First World War: Battleground of the Great Powers (edited, I. B. Tauris, 2006)
• Men of Order: Authoritarian Modernization under Atatürk and Reza Shah (I. B. Tauris, 2004)
• Azerbaijan: Ethnicity and the Struggle for Power in Iran (I. B. Tauris, 2000)
• Post-Soviet Central Asiaz, co-editor: John O'Kane (I. B. Tauris, 1998)
• Azerbaijan: Ethnicity and Autonomy in Twentieth-Century Iran (I. B. Tauris, 1993)

References