Mattin Biglari 

Mattin Biglari is a Postdoctoral Researcher at SOAS, University of London, and an Alexander von Humboldt Fellow at the Leibniz-Zentrum Moderner Orient (ZMO) in Berlin. His research focuses on the history of oil in Iran and the Middle East, especially focusing on labour, infrastructure, and environment. He has wider interests in connecting energy/environmental humanities, science & technology studies, and postcolonial studies. His monograph, titled Refining Knowledge: Labour, Expertise and Oil Nationalisation in Iran will be published with Edinburgh University Press in 2024. He is now researching a comparative environmental history of oil refineries across the Indian Ocean in the era of global decolonisation. In addition to being a member of OCMELA, he is a co-founder of the SOAS Walter Rodney Collective.

Publications

• Refining Knowledge: Labour, Expertise and Oil Nationalisation in Iran (forthcoming 2024, Edinburgh University Press).
• ‘“Resource Imperialism and Resistance: Labour, Security and Social Reproduction after Iranian Oil Nationalisation”, Journal of Energy History 9 (2023) – [Co-authored with Rowena Abdul Razak].
• ‘Iranian Oil Nationalisation as Decolonisation: Historiographical Reflections, Global History and Postcolonial Theory’, in Iran and Global Decolonisation, ed. Firoozeh Kashani-Sabet and Robert Steele (forthcoming, 2023).
• ‘Making Oil Men: Expertise, Discipline and Subjectivity in the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company’s Training Schemes’, in Life Worlds of Oil in the Middle East: Histories and Ethnographies of Black Gold, ed. Nelida Fuccaro and Mandana Limbert (Edinburgh University Press, 2023), 221-48.