Ciruce Movahedi-Lankarani

Development in Iran; Energy Infrastructures in the Middle East; Scientific and Technological Imaginaries in Iran; Technology and Environmental Change; Social and Cultural Understandings of the Environment; History of Modern Iran

• USC Dornsife Center on Science, Technology, and Public Life,

Ciruce A. Movahedi-Lankarani is the Farhang Foundation Early Career Chair in Iranian Studies and Assistant Professor of Middle East Studies and Environmental Studies at the University of Southern California. Ciruce studies modern Iran, focusing on the country’s recent history through the interwoven perspectives of technology, development, and the environment.

Ciruce’s current book project, tentatively titled A Vector of Acceleration: Energy Infrastructures, Development, and the Environment in Modern Iran, studies the history of natural gas in twentieth century Iran. It follows the movement of the resource from underground reservoirs through infrastructures of refining and distribution into everyday life, in the process tracing the interconnections of development planners, oil firms, industrialists, engineers, consumers, mountain ranges, sedimentary rock layers, and natural gas itself. At the heart of the book is an exploration of how the material properties of Iran’s vast fossil fuel resources and their infrastructures of exploitation both reflected and influenced competing notions of progress, modernity, prosperity, and the environment during a period of self-conscious modernization in the country. Drawing upon perspectives in Middle Eastern history, the history of energy, science and technology studies, and political ecology, the book contributes to our knowledge of development in modern Iran, the creation of fossil fuel energy systems in the Global South, and the role of anticolonial politics in the creation of intensive hydrocarbon energy regimes and the climate crisis they have spawned. By linking debates on the roots of anthropogenic climate change to the politics of resource extraction in Iran, A Vector of Acceleration sheds light on state building and the sociopolitical significance of infrastructure in the modern Middle East while also decentering the particular histories of Europe and North America in our understandings of anthropogenic climate change.

Ciruce’s research reflects not only his interests in Iranian history and the environment, but also his training and professional experience in engineering. Through those experiences he developed an appreciation for peoples’ varied interactions with technology and his work seeks to explore the historically contingent ways they have encountered, adopted, adapted, translated, and rejected technologies in both practical and ideational terms. In emphasizing the environmental contexts in which such events were embedded, he studies how imaginaries of technology and the environment in the Global South have had and will have profound implications for people and societies in the region, humanity as a whole, and the natural world.

Ciruce’s work has been supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Social Science Research Council.

• Ph.D. History, University of Pennsylvania, 2020
• M.A. Social Sciences, University of Chicago, 2012
• B.S. Computer Science & Mathematics, Pennsylvania State University, University Park, 2005