Pardis Mahdavi

The untold story of generations of Middle Eastern freedom fighters—horsewomen who safeguarded an ancient breed of Caspian horse—and their efforts to defend their homelands from the Taliban and others seeking to destroy them. "A breathtaking book that revisits nearly one hundred years of Iranian history, highlighting the power and beauty of women who refuse to be subdued.” ―Alison Hawthorne Deming, author of A Woven World Book of Queens reaches back centuries to the Persian Empire and a woman disguised as a man, facing an invading army, protected only by light armor and the stallion she sat astride. Mahdavi draws a thread from past to present: from her fearless Iranian grandmother, who guided survivors of domestic violence to independent mountain colonies in Afghanistan where the women, led by a general named Mina, became their country’s first line of defense from marauding warlords. To the female warriors who helped train and breed the horses used by US Green Berets when they touched down in October 2001, with a mission but insufficient intelligence on the ground—women whose contributions were then forgotten.

Dr. Pardis Mahdavi will become president of The University of La Verne Mahdavi served as Provost and Executive Vice President at the University of Montana most recently. Previously, she was acting dean of the Josef Korbel School of International Studies at the University of Denver and director of the Pacific Basin Institute and dean of women at Pomona College.

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis signed a bill Monday that promises to defund diversity, equity and inclusion programs at public colleges throughout the state. The bill has drawn criticism from policymakers and free speech advocates, and it also raises concern from higher education administrators like me. Without these programs, graduates will be less prepared to enter the workforce.

Pardis will be speaking at the TEDxURI 2023: The Creative Spark Event hosted by The University of Rhode Island April 1, 2023 1-3 p.m. Edwards Hall 64 Upper College Road Kingston, Rhode Island TEDxURI brings big ideas to the world stage through the inspirational voices of our community and beyond, and our speakers challenge us to think bigger than ourselves, participate in shaping the future, and do our part in protecting the planet. TEDxURI 2023 theme is all about sharing inspirational, enlightening stories about creativity and the creative spark that started it all. Creativity is everywhere in the human experience. It is not a skill reserved solely for artists and designers. It is a skill that is useful to everybody, no matter what you do or where your passions lie. Developing, nurturing and sharing our creative spark is more important than ever.

Offering microcredentials, “backward-designed” courses focused on skills, and embedding the latest technologies into curricula can help universities nurture job-ready graduates for the future workforce. Experts from academia and industry joined a recent Times Higher Education round table, held in partnership with Adobe, to discuss methods of adapting skills education to create more employable US college graduates.

When Mahsa Amini, a 22-year-old Kurdish woman, stepped off the train this past September for her vacation in Tehran, she wore a loose, black chiffon headscarf with five strands of hair showing. The hair was a statement—the five strands symbolizing bold defiance of the regime, en route to a removal of the headscarf altogether. She chose a deep red gloss to cover her lips, a decision that seemed to foreshadow the bloodshed that came next. Within minutes, she was taken aside by the Guidance Patrol

In 2007, Pardis Mahdavi was 13 minutes into her lecture at a university in Tehran about gender and sexuality in post-revolutionary Iran when the morality police stormed through the auditorium doors. “Pandemonium erupted. I was…pulled off stage. I was frozen in a state of suspended animation and…turned to look at one of them who had raised a hand and then I blacked out,” Mahdavi says. Iranian authorities charged Mahdavi, who is provost of the University of Montana, with trying to foment a revolut

A tragic loss of life has sparked a nation to demand their basic human rights following decades of strict laws. Town Square with Ernie Manouse airs at 3 p.m. CT. Tune in on 88.7FM, listen online or subscribe to the podcast. Join the discussion at 888-486-9677, questions@townsquaretalk.org or @townsquaretalk. For a month now, protests have raged on in Iran following the brutal death of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini by the morality police for allegedly failing to meet the requirements of the country's

Shouts of “death to the dictator” and “woman, life, freedom” are reverberating throughout the streets of Iran following the death of Mahsa Amini, a 22-year-old woman, while in custody of the “morality police” in Tehran. These protests have echoes from past resistance movements. For the past two decades I have been studying gender and sexual politics in post-revolutionary Iran through on-the-ground ethnographic fieldwork. For some 40 years following the Feb. 11, 1979, Iranian Revolution, when Ay

Nasrin’s family, her advocates, and Nasrin herself won’t be silenced. On Wednesday, as celebrations erupted around the world in response to the inauguration of President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris, Nasrin Sotoudeh, the Iranian human rights attorney, was quietly moved back to Qarchak women’s prison—known as one of the worst and most harrowing carceral institutions in the world—after a brief respite in the hospital where she was seeking medical care. While Jan. 20, 2021 was a lar

Leaders in Iran want people to have more children. To reach this goal, they have passed new legislation that limits access to contraceptives and abortions. The World's Shirin Jaafari reports.

As we continue to monitor the situation in Afghanistan, many are concerned about the safety of women and young children in the country. Taliban fighters are notorious for taking young women, particularly as their brides. Dean Pardis Mahdavi is the head of social sciences at ASU’s College of Liberal Arts and Sciences and has family connections in Afghanistan—we talked about the ordeal earlier.