Pedram Khosronejad is Adjunct Professor at the School of Social Sciences at Western Sydney University and the founding moderator of Anthropology of the Middle East and Central Eurasia (ACME) network of the European Association of Social Anthropologists (EASA). He is internationally recognised for his contribution to the fields of visual piety and material religion; war, memory and forced displacement; gender, sexuality, and race including slavery in modern Iran and Persianate societies, the greater Middle East and Central Asia, the Muslim world and Australia. In particular, he explores the manners by which culture, memory, and visual material are bound up in as well as influenced and altered by wider political, social, and cultural trends.
Professor Khosronejad has taught at the University of Oxford (2004-2007) and was appointed as the Goli Rais Larizadeh Chair of the Iran Heritage Foundation for the Anthropology of Iran at the University of St Andrews (2007-2015). He was also a Visiting Professor at the National Museum of Ethnology, Osaka (2013-2014) and elected as a Visiting Professor at the Institute for Advanced Studies of Nantes (2014-2015). He also served as Farzaneh Family Scholar and Associate Director for Iranian and Persian Gulf Studies at the Oklahoma State University (2015-2019). Between July 2020 and January 2023, he was appointed as the Curator of Persian Arts at the Powerhouse Museum, Sydney.
His research has been funded by the Wenner-Gren Foundation, the British Academy, the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS), amongst others. His monograph, Les Lions en Pierre Sculptée chez les Bakhtiari: Description et significations de sculptures zoomorphes dans une société tribale du sud-ouest de l'Iran [Stone Lion Sculptures among the Bakhtiari: Descriptions and Meanings of Zoomorphoric Sculptures in a Tribal Society of South-western Iran] (Sean Kingston, 2012) remains as one of the pioneering pluridisciplinary investigations of the interconnections of memory, religion, and tribal sacred material culture. He has published in English, French, and Persian in Visual Anthropology, International Journal of Communication, Iranian Studies, Iran (Journal of the British Institute of Persian Studies, the British Academy), and Anthropology News. He has edited six interdisciplinary volumes and served as guest editor of two special issues on visual anthropology and anthropology of post-revolutionary Iran. He also designed and published three online interactive anthropological research platforms (Digital Humanities) on the topic of ‘Death and Dying’ based on a ten-year period extensive living and performing multifaceted ethnography amongst the Bakhtiari pastoral nomads of Iran. His documentary film The Last Lions of the Bakhtiari was financed by the British Academy, produced by the French National Centre for Scientific Research, and presented at several ethnographical film festivals including Regards Compare- Festival Jean Rouch and The Royal Anthropological Institute Film Festival.
Since 2004, Professor Khosronejad has curated thirteen exhibitions in British, American, Australian, and Iranian universities, museums, and galleries. This includes leading curatorial exhibition projects Aroosi: 150 Years of Iranian Wedding Traditions (24 February – 31 May 2020) at the University of Southern California, and Iranzamin (19 March – 8 August 2021), Charkha and Kargha: Indian Textiles from the Powerhouse Collection (13 August 2022 – 15 January 2023), Weavers, Merchants, and Kings (8 September 2022 – 20 January 2023) at the Powerhouse Museum, Sydney.
He has been interviewed by several international and Australian newspapers, magazines, radio channels and podcasts, including The Guardian, Le Figaro, The Australian, The Sydney Morning Herald, Art Guide Australia, Australian Arts Review, Hali Magazine, ABC, SBS, and BBC International, amongst others.
Professor Khosronjead serves as manuscript reviewer for American Ethnologist, Current Anthropology, Global Journal of Anthropology Research, Visual Anthropology and Visual Anthropology Review. He also serves as grant reviewer for American Council of Learned Societies, Swiss National Science Foundation, The Prince Claus Fund (Netherlands), The Arts & Humanities Research Council, and The British Academy.
Since August 2019, Professor Khosronejad has been working on a groundbreaking interdisciplinary research project about German civilian expatriates of Iran who had been detained by the British Army in Iran in 1941 after the country’s invasion during the Second World War, brought to the Australian Internment Prison Camps, and stayed in Australia since the end of war.