Why do authoritarian states closely control what content is covered in history textbooks? And what can their textbooks tell us about how these states perceive themselves and the people they rule?
P21 Gallery, London | 6pm GMT, 26th November 2026 | Click Here to Register
In her important new book, State Histories: The Politics of Teaching the Past in Iran, Yasamin Alkhansa develops a rigorous analysis of the way successive Iranian regimes have narrated Iran’s history to their own populations. Approaching primary school history textbooks as autobiographies of the state, she argues that these texts reveal the problems, challenges, and pressures the state believes itself to face.
Especially in times of heightened grassroots mobilisation, authoritarian states become subject to what Alkhansa calls ‘history fever’, the anxious desire to revise and rewrite textbooks in the face of evolving threats to their cultural hegemony. The resulting textbooks are contradictory documents: while they project universalising myths about the nation’s history, the stories they tell are constantly shifting. In Iran, this dynamic has been on full display in recent years.
As movements like the Woman, Life, Freedom protests have mounted a potent challenge to the state’s self-portrayal, the state has feverishly sought to reassert its hegemony by way of its textbooks.
Yasamin Alkhansa is an Associate Researcher at the University of Sussex. She was an ISRF Independent Scholar Fellow 2023–24, and previously a visiting scholar at the School of History, University of St Andrews.
Yasamin will be joined by Ali Ansari, Professor of Iranian History and Director of the Institute for Iranian Studies at the University of St Andrews, author of Iran (Polity, 2024); and Orkideh Behrouzan, Senior Lecturer in Anthropology at SOAS University of London, author of Prozak Diaries: Psychiatry and Generational Memory in Iran (Stanford University Press, 2016).
A Q&A will follow, moderated by Christopher Newfield, ISRF Director of Research.