Simon Theobald

An anthropologist by training, Dr Theobald conducted fifteen months of fieldwork in Mashhad, Iran's second largest city, from 2015-2018 as part of his doctoral thesis that explored the legacy of revolutionary utopianism in everyday life. From 2021 to 2022 he worked at the University of Hamburg, researching Iranian Muslim piety in the diaspora. He is currently a postdoctoral researcher at the Institute for Ethics and Society at the University of Notre Dame, Australia, and a research fellow at the Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies, where he is working towards publishing his first book based on his work in Iran. He is also currently working on a research project that examines the relationship between Jewish and Muslims communities and ideas of "social cohesion" in Western democracies.