Dr Reza Zia-Ebrahimi is a decolonial and antiracist historian who examines how nationalism and race shape modern power, knowledge, and violence. His research explores how antisemitism and Islamophobia intersect; how conspiracy theories racialise and sustain state technologies of surveillance, coercion, control, and genocide; and how the politics of antisemitism shape the colonisation of Palestine. He is also interested in how colonial epistemologies are internalised by non-Western elites, particularly in Iran.

Research interests and PhD supervision

• Race and racial structures
• Colonialism and knowledge
• Islamophobia in Western Europe
• Conspiracy theories and race
• Ideology and the colonisation of Palestine
• Nationalism and race in Iran

For more details, please see his full research profile.

Teaching

6AAH3095 Race, Orientalism and Islamophobia since 1800

5AAH2030 Faraway so close: The Middle East since 1800 (with DrRana Baker)

Selected publications

Antisémitisme et islamophobie : une histoire croisée (Antisemitism and Islamophobia: An entangled history). Paris: Éditions d’Amsterdam, 2021.

The emergence of Iranian nationalism: Race and the politics of dislocation. Columbia University Press, 2016.

‘In pursuit of whiteness: Why Iranian monarchists cheer Israel’s genocide’, in Jadaliyya (September 2025).

‘The islamogauchisme discourse, or the power to create the inner enemy’, in French Cultural Studies (2023).

‘The French origins of Islamophobia denial’, in Patterns of Prejudice, vol. 54, no. 4 (2020): 315-346.

‘When the elders of Zion relocated to Eurabia: Conspiratorial racialization in antisemitism and Islamophobia’, in Patterns of Prejudice, vol. 52, no. 4 (2018): 314-337.

‘Self-orientalization and dislocation: The uses and abuses of the “Aryan” discourse in Iran.’ Iranian Studies, vol. 44, no. 4 (2011): 445-472.