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The Iranian Revolution of 1979 marked a watershed moment in world politics. Coined “the last great revolution,” the mass movements of the late 1970s led to the toppling of the U.S.’ greatest ally in the region, Mohammad Reza Shah, and the birth of the first modern Islamic Republic. In essence, the events of 1979 in Iran shifted the global geo-political terrain, which have had profound repercussions to this day. In this course, we will consider the factors that led to the Revolution and study how the political struggles after the fall of the Shah played out. We will delve into the dynamic political formations of the Islamic Republic and the emergence of the regime’s political economy in both the war and post-war years. We will study the impact of the Iran-Iraq war on Iranian domestic and foreign relations and will read and discuss the suppression of opposition groups in the 1980s, looking at how oppositional politics reemerged from the prisons after the ceasefire with Iraq in 1988. We will cover the women’s movement, the labor movement, the teacher’s movement, and the student movement, in an effort to more fully understand state-society relations in contemporary Iran. Along this vein, we will carefully examine social developments in urban and non-urban centers of the country. Throughout the course, we focus on how the Iranian Revolution has been framed in the past four decades, especially in the west, and what this framing either elucidates or obfuscates in regards to politics, social organization, citizenship, identity, nationalism, and religion. <a href="http://bit.ly/1bebp5s" target="_blank">Click here to see evaluations, syllabi, and faculty bios</a>