Claudia Yaghoobi is Roshan Distinguished Professor of Persian Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. A scholar of Iranian cultural studies, gender and sexuality studies, and diaspora studies, she centers the voices and communities that have often remained at the margins of literary, cultural, and historical narratives, particularly women and sexual, ethnic, and religious minorities.

Her scholarship spans classical Persian literature and Sufism, gender and body politics in modern Iranian literature and film, Iranian Armenian diaspora and transnational culture, and contemporary movements addressing gender and sexual violence in Iran. She is the author of Subjectivity in ‘Attar, Persian Sufism, and European Mysticism (Purdue University Press, 2017), Temporary Marriage in Iran: Gender and Body Politics in Modern Persian Literature and Film (Cambridge University Press, 2020), and Transnational Culture in the Iranian Armenian Diaspora (Edinburgh University Press, 2023), and editor of The #MeToo Movement in Iran: Reporting Sexual Violence and Harassment (I.B. Tauris/Bloomsbury, 2023). Her fourth monograph, Translating a Revolution: Armenian Women’s Voices from Iran to the US, is forthcoming from UNC Press in March 2027.

Across her research, teaching, academic leadership, and public humanities work, Yaghoobi is interested in how the humanities can create space for overlooked voices, foster difficult conversations, and connect scholarship to the communities and histories it seeks to understand.

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