Shahla Talebi is assistant professor of Religious Studies in the School of Historical, Philosophical and Religious Studies at Arizona State University. A native of Iran, she lived through the 1979 Revolution and the Iran-Iraq War and left Iran in 1994 to the United States where she now resides. Her research interests include questions of self-sacrifice and martyrdom, violence, memory, trauma, death, burial, funerary rituals, commemoration and memorialization or their banning, religion, revolution, and nation-state in contemporary Iran. She is the author of the book Ghosts of Revolution: Rekindled Memories of Imprisonment in Iran (Stanford University Press, 2011). Recent articles include “From the Light of the Eye to the Eye of the Power” and "Who is Behind the Name? A Story of Violence, Loss, and Melancholic Survival in Post-Revolutionary Iran."

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