The Irvin D. Reid Honors College at Wayne State University has named Erfan Saidi Moqadam, Ph.D., as one of two of their pre-faculty fellows for the Pathway to Faculty (PTF) program.

Saidi Moqadam holds a bachelor’s in music from the University of Tehran, a master’s in anthropology from Islamic Azad University, and a Ph.D. in anthropology from the University of Kentucky.  He has held teaching positions at the University of Kentucky.

His research interests include race, ethnicity, religion, identity, and Middle Eastern communities in the U.S. His dissertation titled “Negotiating Islam: Debating authority and ethnoreligious authenticity among Iranian Americans in the U.S. South,” analyzes the reconciliation of Muslim identity with the predominantly Christian society of the U.S.

“I aim to broaden my next project’s theoretical scope and expand its analysis of minority groups not limited to Iranian and Middle Eastern communities to engage new questions of how concepts of race, ethnicity, and class are conflated among racially minoritized groups in the city of Detroit,” Saidi Moqadam said. “I will explore the ways in which minoritized groups operationalize racial meaning in a dynamic manner to conceptualize their sense of ethnicity, whiteness, class, racialization, citizenship, and even religiosity in the whole U.S. social order.”

He said PTF provides the unique opportunity for collaboration with the anthropology department while he teaches at the Honors College. The campus environment will allow him to understand the intellectual and emotional needs of the students to enhance diversity, equity and inclusion at WSU while he refines his teaching technique and pursues a tenure-track position.

Professors Andrew Newman, Ph.D., and Lauren Hayes, Ph.D., will serve as Saidi Moqadam’s faculty mentors.

“I hope my research expands our understanding of what it means to be a member of racially and ethnically minoritized communities,” Saidi Moqadam said. “As an ethnographer, I hope to publish the result of my research and explore how students as members of these communities engage and mobilize responses to the lived realities of their city and the anti-truth movements.”