Mahnaz Afkhami Papers: July 2026 Collection Update

By Shabnam Golkhandan
Digital Curator and Processor of Afkhami Collection
Booth Family Center for Special Collections
Georgetown University Library
sr1864@georgetown.edu

The Mahnaz Afkhami Papers is a singular record of how the modern history of Iran has been interwoven with the global history of women’s rights, human rights, and democratic civil society. The collection, housed at Georgetown University Library’s Booth Family Center for Special Collections, takes as its locus the personal papers of Mahnaz Afkhami, around which have accumulated seven decades of organizational records, correspondence, publications, photographs and audiovisual material, oral histories, conference files, and the policy documents of the many institutions she built or served. What it preserves, in the end, is a life: one given over to scholarship and public service in Iran, and after 1979 to advocacy carried on across the Middle East, North Africa, and much of the Global South.

That life deserves a brief telling. Afkhami’s brief assignment as the professor of English Literature and chair of department at the National University of Iran from 1967 to 1970 came to an end when she was compelled to join the women’s movement, first as Secretary-General of the Women’s Organization of Iran and then, from 1976, as Minister of State for Women’s Affairs, a portfolio very few women anywhere had yet held. The revolution of 1979, which foreclosed her plan to establish the United Nations’ International Research and Training Institute for the Advancement of Women (INSTRAW) in Tehran and carried her, with her family, into exile in the United States, interrupted this work without ever arresting it. In Washington DC, Afkhami co-founded the Foundation for Iranian Studies, which she has directed since 1981; she led, and exponentially expanded, the Sisterhood Is Global Institute through the 1990s; and in 2000 she founded the Women’s Learning Partnership, which she leads still. Legal literacy, civic education, women’s leadership: the programs these institutions carried into Muslim-majority societies and across the Global South are all documented here, often from first memorandum to final report.

For historians of Iran’s last half-century, the collection’s importance cannot be overstated. But its interest hardly stops at Iran’s borders. This archive offers something scholars rarely find in one place: the chance to watch women’s rights become an international language, and to watch that language being spoken, resisted, and remade in each local setting. The Women’s Organization of Iran’s presence at the 1975 UN World Conference on Women in Mexico City is one such moment. The Sisterhood Is Global Institute’s “Claiming Our Rights” curriculum, translated into several languages and taught in workshops with grassroots organizations from the Middle East to Central Asia, is another, and they are only two of many!

The papers also document the policy gatherings through which so much of our present moment’s history was shaped. Extensive documentation on the UN World Conferences on Women and the Beijing implementation meetings are here, as are the State of the World Forum, AWID forums, Middle East Studies Association panels, World Bank debates over culture and development, and a long series of international convenings on violence against women, on peace, on religion and political participation. Taken together, these files amount to the working archive of a truly transnational movement, kept and shaped by one of its architects.

Very few other collections, if any, can be compared to Afkhami Papers in breadth and reach that can similarly connect state feminism to grassroots activism, Iran to its diaspora, and United Nations frameworks to the classrooms of local women’s movements with such density of documentation.

For Georgetown, the archive offers an extraordinary foundation for Persian Studies while drawing in students of history, international affairs, gender, development, law, and religion. It positions the university as a leading site for research on Iran in global context: not as a bounded national field, but as a vital intellectual crossroads for the study of rights, democracy, culture, governance, and social change.