Dr. Sana Chavoshian

Sana Chavoshian studies the events surrounding the Iran-Iraq war (1980-88), and the post-war politics of martyrdom and religious reform in Iran. In her dissertation “Women, Martyrs and Stones Women’s Piety in Iran’s Post-War Polity” (Leipzig 2019), she explored the post-war politics of Shiite women’s piety from private home-based practices to the public discourse of “martyr-cult” during devotional activities at graveyards and pilgrimages to the former battlefield. She examined how women’s veneration of martyrs often divert from the “official script” favored by the state, thus challenging the authority of city administrators, religious leaders, and state representatives. Interlacing sociology of religion and new material studies, she showed how women engage with material and non-material traces of the deceased bodies of their husbands or sons while apprehending the spiritual energy of the deceased and from this draw charismatic authority. 

In a collaborative project with Prof. Wohlrab-Sahr on “Reorientations of religious intellectuals in Iran” at the HCAS “Multiple Secularities – Beyond the West, Beyond Modernities”, they reconstruct positions among social scientists and “religious intellectuals” on the prospects of secularity in contemporary Iran. They have extended their depiction of the field by querying the international field of conflict and compatibility between Islam and secularity among scholars and academicians.