Afsaneh Najmabadi is the Francis Lee Higginson Professor of History and of Studies of Women, Gender, and Sexuality at Harvard University. Her book, Women with Mustaches and Men without Beards: Gender and Sexual Anxieties of Iranian Modernity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), received the 2005 Joan Kelly Memorial Prize from the American Historical Association. With Kathryn Babayan, she co-edited Islamicate Sexualities: Translations across Temporal Geographies of Desire (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, Middle Eastern Monographs, 2008). Her latest book, Professing Selves: Transsexuality and Same-Sex Desire in Contemporary Iran (Duke University Press, 2013) was a finalist for Lambda Literary Award in 2014, and received the 2014 Joan Kelly Memorial Prize from American Historical Association.

Najmabadi leads a digital archive and website, Women’s Worlds in Qajar Iran. The project was recently awarded its third two-year grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, and it was recognized by the White House Office of Public Engagement in May of 2012.