“Denied Citizens: Baha’is in the Post-1979 Revolution of Iran”

Summary: The Baha’i Faith was founded in 1844 in Iran. Today, the Baha’i community constitutes the largest non-Muslim religious minority in the country. Despite this, Baha’is are denied recognition as citizens. Since the 1979 revolution, their circumstances have deteriorated further, with systemic persecution that includes exclusion from official employment, higher education, legal marriage recognition, and dignified burial services. This talk examines the struggles of the Baha’i community in Iran, placing these challenges within a broader historical context. It also examines the impact of the regime’s suppressive response to the 2022 “Woman, Life, Freedom” movement on the Baha’i community.

Bio: Saghar Sadeghian is an Associate Professor of History at Willamette University. She began her higher education in Iran at the clandestine Baha’i Institute for Higher Education (BIHE) before earning a master’s in Historical Research from Lancaster University (U.K.) and a Ph.D. from Sorbonne Nouvelle, Paris 3.

Sadeghian has served as a Post-Doctoral Fellow of Iranian Studies and a Rice Faculty Fellow at the MacMillan Center at Yale University. Her first book, Iranian Non-Muslim Communities: Exploration and Negotiation of Social Space during the Constitutional Revolution (1891–1911), is currently under revision for publication.

She has been awarded the Gerda Henkel Fellowship for the calendar year 2025 to work on her new book project, Green Gold: An Environmental History of the Caspian Forests (1800–Present). Her research interests include environmental history, minority groups, women, and gender studies. At Willamette, she teaches courses on the modern Middle East.