Dr. Ziba Mir-Hosseini is a legal anthropologist, specializing in Islamic law, gender and development. She has a BA in Sociology from Tehran University (1974) and a PhD in Social Anthropology from University of Cambridge (1980). She is Professorial Research Associate at the Centre for Middle Eastern and Islamic Law, University of London. She has held numerous research fellowships and visiting professorships, including a Fellowship at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin (2004-5), and Hauser Global Law Visiting Professor at New York University (2002-8).
Dr. Mir-Hosseini is a founding member of Musawah Global Movement for Equality and Justice in the Muslim Family.
Her publications include Marriage on Trial: A Study of Islamic Family Law in Iran and Morocco (I. B. Tauris, 1993, 2002), Islam and Gender: The Religious Debate in Contemporary Iran (Princeton University Press, 1999), (with Richard Tapper) Islam and Democracy in Iran: Eshkevari and the Quest for Reform (I. B. Tauris, 2006), (with Vanja Hamzic) Control and Sexuality: the Revival of Zina Laws in Muslim Contexts (Women Living Under Muslim Laws, 2010), Men in charge? Rethinking Authority in Muslim Legal Tradition, edited with Mulki Al-Sharmani and Jana Rumminger (Oneworld, 2015). She has also directed (with Kim Longinotto) two award-winning feature-length documentary films on contemporary issues in Iran: Divorce Iranian Style (1998) and Runaway (2001).
Major: Social and Developmental Planning. Subsidiary Subjects: Statistics and Economics.
Thesis title: Changing Aspects of Economic and Family Structures in Kalardasht, a District of Northern Iran.
(with Kim Longinotto)
Teaching
As a free-lance academic, when I am invited to teach I have the luxury of being able to offer courses on topics that are closely related to my own interests, that I am passionately involved in, and that want to study in greater depth myself. I have taught at anthropology, sociology and law departments in various countries; between 1990 and 1998 I contributed regularly to teaching in Cambridge, and since 2000 I have taught with colleagues in Law at SOAS. My most sustained period of teaching was at the Law School, New York University, where I was a Global Visiting Professor for a semester every other year between 2002 and 2008, designing and teaching three different courses.
I have also helped design and teach a number of short training courses on ‘Islam from a Rights Perspective’, which are intended to enable women’s rights activists from different countries to understand Muslim legal tradition, not to be silenced by those who claim religious authority on questionable grounds, and to be able to challenge patriarchal and unjust interpretations from within the tradition. Currently, I am working closely with Musawah, developing and conducting further short courses to insert women’s voices and concerns into the process of law making, and to honour ‘women’s ways of knowing’.
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Biennial meeting of the International Society for Iranian Studies.