A peasant is a pre-industrial agricultural laborer or a farmer with limited land-ownership, especially one living in the Middle Ages under feudalism and paying rent, tax, fees, or services to a landlord. In Europe, three classes of peasants existed: non-free slaves, semi-free serfs, and free tenants. Peasants might hold title to land outright, or by any of several forms of land tenure, among them socage, quit-rent, leasehold, and copyhold.
Andre Gunder Frank was a German-American sociologist and economic historian who promoted dependency theory after 1970 and world-systems theory after 1984. He employed some Marxian concepts on political economy, but rejected Marx's stages of history, and economic history generally.
Asef Bayat is an Iranian-American Professor of Sociology. He currently holds the Catherine and Bruce Bastian Chair in Global and Transnational Studies in the Department of Sociology at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Prior to his tenure at Illinois, Bayat was a faculty member at the American University in Cairo and served as the Director of the International Institute for the Study of Islam in the Modern World (ISIM) at Leiden University, The Netherlands, where he also held the Chair of Society and Culture of the Modern Middle East. Additionally, he has held visiting positions at the University of California, Berkeley; Columbia University; the University of Oxford; and Brown University.
John Richard Urry was a British sociologist who served as a professor at Lancaster University. He is noted for work in the fields of the sociology of tourism and mobility.
Roy Parviz Mottahedeh was an American historian who was Gurney Professor of History, Emeritus at Harvard University, where he taught courses on the pre-modern social and intellectual history of the Islamic Middle East and was an expert on Iranian culture. Mottahedeh served as the director of Harvard's Center for Middle Eastern Studies from 1987 to 1990, and as the inaugural director of the Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal Islamic Studies Program at Harvard University from 2005 to 2011. He was a follower of the Baha'i faith.
Homa Katouzian is an economist, historian, sociologist and literary critic, with a special interest in Iranian studies. Katouzian's formal academic training was in economics and the social sciences but he concurrently continued his studies of Persian history and literature at a professional academic level. He began studying the life and works of the modern Persian writer, Sadeq Hedayat, and that of the Prime Minister of Iran in the early 1950s, Mohammad Mosaddeq, while still a faculty member in the department of economics at the University of Kent at Canterbury. Having taught economics at universities in Britain and other countries for eighteen years, he took voluntary retirement in 1986 to devote his entire time to Iranian studies. In recent years, he has been teaching and writing on classical Persian literature, in particular the 13th-century poet and writer, Sa‘di. Currently based at the University of Oxford, Katouzian is a member of the Faculty of Oriental Studies and the Roshan Institute Academic Visitor in Iranian Studies at St. Antony's College, where for thirteen years he edited the bimonthly Iranian Studies, the journal of the Association for Iranian Studies. He is editor of the International Journal of Persian Literature, and co-editor of Routledge's Iranian studies book series. He is also a former member of the editorial board of Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East and Comparative Economic Studies.
Hassan Rahimpour-Azghadi is an Iranian conservative public speaker, conspiracy theorist and ideologue. He has been a member of Iran's Supreme Council of the Cultural Revolution since 2003.
George Lenczowski was a lawyer, diplomat, scholar, and Professor of Political Science, Emeritus, at the University of California, Berkeley. Lenczowski was a pioneer in his field as the founder and first chair of the Committee of Middle Eastern Studies at Berkeley. He was among America's first major scholars of the modern Middle East.
Kamran Talattof is the Elahé Omidyar Mir-Djalali Chair in Persian and Iranian studies at the University of Arizona.
Ervand Abrahamian is an Iranian-American historian of the Middle East. He is Distinguished Professor of History at Baruch College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York and is widely regarded as one of the leading historians of modern Iran.
Steven Pressman is an American economist. He is a former Professor of Economics and Finance at Monmouth University in West Long Branch, New Jersey. He has taught at the University of New Hampshire and Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut.
Michael Mehrdad R.S.C. Izady or Michael Izady, is a contemporary writer on ethnic and cultural topics, particularly the Greater Middle East, and Kurds.
Reza Banakar was an Iranian-born Professor of Legal Sociology at Lund University, Sweden. Before joining Lund in 2013, he was Professor of Socio-Legal Studies at the Department of Advanced Legal Studies at the University of Westminster, London.
Prof. Shahram Akbarzadeh is based at Deakin University in Melbourne, Australia. Prior to his commencing his appointment at Deakin University in 2014, he was professor of Middle Eastern politics at the University of Melbourne. Akbarzadeh completed his M.A. in Russian and East European Studies at Birmingham University in 1992 and acquired a PhD at La Trobe University in 1998. He served as the Central and West Asia Councillor for the Asian Studies Association of Australia from 1999 to 2004. His numerous publications include works on Middle East politics, Central Asian politics and the politics of radicalisation among the Muslim community of Australia.
The Center for Middle Eastern studies (CMES) is part of the Faculty of Social Sciences at Lund University, based in Lund, Sweden. It was founded in 2007 to further the understanding of the Middle East, and provide the business sector, state institutions and NGOs with "effective tools for communication". The backbone of the center is the strategic research area known as the MECW, or The Middle East in the Contemporary World, which was funded by the Swedish Research Council. The MA program began in 2010. It is a two-year, four-semester, program that offers a wide range of specialization within Middle Eastern Studies.
Leif Stenberg has been the Dean of the Institute for the Study of Muslim Civilisations at the Aga Khan University (International) in London since April 2017.
Roksana Bahramitash is an Iranian-born Canadian sociologist, author, and professor. Her work focuses on women, employment and the informal economy in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA), as well as gender segregation in Islam, and microeconomics. In post-revolution Iran, Bahramitash was working on improving peasant women's literacy and access to economic development resources.
Abbas Amanat is an Iranian-born American historian, scholar, author, editor, and university professor. He serves as the William Graham Sumner Professor of History at Yale University and Director of the Yale Program in Iranian Studies.
Mostafa Azkia is an Iranian sociologist. Azkia is a major figure in the study of Iranian rural development. He is a professor of sociology at the University of Tehran.. He is the author and translator of about 20 books. His chapter in Twenty Years of Islamic Revolution: Political and Social Transition in Iran since 1979 edited by Eric Hooglan, titled Rural Society and Revolutionin Iran is considered to be seminal work in this area. He is considered to be one of the founding fathers of rural development studies in Iran.
Radical Islam: The Iranian Mojahedin is a book by historian Ervand Abrahamian about the late 20th-century political history of Iran, and a thorough case study of the People's Mujahedin of Iran (MEK). The book also includes a short biography of Ali Shariati and a review of his works in order to explore the influence this had on the group's early ideological traits. The book was a duplicate publication by I.B. Tauris and by Yale University Press, being first published by the former in 1989 in the United Kingdom. It is widely regarded as an important academic source on the MEK.
