PhD Candidate Sociocultural Anthropology
Graduating January 2025
Research Interests
North America; Migration; Religion; Islam in the West, Existential Anthropology; Hope and Well-being; Linguistic Anthropology.
About
Mahtab Sirdani is a doctoral student in sociocultural anthropology at Boston University. Her dissertation research focuses on the interplay between vulnerability, hope, and well-being of Muslim Iranian migrants in North America, especially Muslim residents of Massachusetts in the United States and Vancouver, BC in Canada. Mahtab received an M.T.S. from Harvard Divinity School in 2016 with a focus on Religion, Literature, and Culture. She also holds an M.A. in Linguistics from Allameh Tabatabi University in Tehran, Iran where she defended a dissertation about morphophonology in Persian Language.
She has been a teaching fellow in the Department of Anthropology as well as an instructor of Modern Persian in the Department of World Languages and Literatures.
Awards & Grants
- Cora Du Bois Dissertation Writing Fellowship. (2022).
- Department of Anthropology Summer Research Grant. (2020).
- CURA Colloquium Fellowship. (2019-2020)
- Department of Anthropology Summer Research Grant. (2018)
- Boston University Dean’s Fellowship. (Fall 2016, Spring 2017, Fall 2020, Spring 2021, Fall 2021, Spring 2022).
Publications
- Translation
2023 Hyde, Lewis. The gift: Creativity and the artist in the modern world. Vintage, 2009. into
Farsi (forthcoming from Rokhdad-e Tazeh Publications, Tehran, Iran).