Naghmeh Sohrabi

Based on several years of ethnographic interviews with former revolutionaries, this book project is a reconstruction of the intimate lives that were folded into the vastness of the 1979 Iranian revolution. In doing so, it illuminates the small-scale experiences that together—and after the fact—came to define “revolutionary experience.” While scholars tend to define revolutions primarily through extraordinary events, “Intimate Lives” seeks to understand and narrate the contours of the 1979 revolution in Iran and its multi-layered meanings through ordinary experiences in the decades preceding it. As such, this book project places the messiness of revolutionary action at its analytical center rather than attempting to explain it away.