Kayhan A. Nejad is the Farzaneh Family Assistant Professor of Iranian Studies at the University of Oklahoma. An historian and international studies scholar by training, Nejad earned his Ph.D. in History from Yale University in 2021. Before joining OU, he served as a Nizami Ganjavi Centre Visiting Fellow at the University of Oxford, and as a Senior Researcher with the Fulbright U.S. Scholar Program at Sabanci University in Istanbul.
Nejad’s research centers the linkages between the greater Middle East and former Soviet Union, a space connecting Iran with Russia, the North and South Caucasus, Afghanistan, and Turkey. His book manuscript, From the Oilfield to the Battlefield: Revolutionary Internationalism on the Imperial Borderlands, rethinks the breakdown in ties between Iranian revolutionaries and their foreign supporters to proffer a new explanation for the re-establishment of monarchy in Iran in 1921. Nejad’s second book project examines the defeat of the socialist left and resurgence of the Islamist alternative between the greater Middle East and former Soviet Union from 1974 to 2001. Future projects include a planned survey history of Iran in the First World War.
At OU, Nejad teaches on modern Iranian history, modern European history, contemporary and historical Iran-U.S. relations, and the global history of communism. His articles have appeared or are forthcoming in Slavic Review, Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History, and Middle Eastern Studies. Nejad serves as the History Book Review Editor for Iranian Studies, and has coedited an anthology, The Caspian World: Connections and Contentions at a Modern Eurasian Crossroads, forthcoming from Cornell University Press (2025). He is an ardent supporter of orangutan conservation efforts and the great ape personhood movement.