Joanna de Groot has interests in three main areas. Her initial research into the social history of Iran in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries has led to work on various aspects of social, political and cultural change in Iran in that period, and their relation to developments elsewhere in the Middle East, in Europe and in North America. This has involved a gendered approach to the study of the past, as well as the comparative study of issues such as modernisation, popular political movements, and the interactions of material and cultural change, drawing on European and American experiences to illumine those in the Middle East, and equally importantly vice versa. It has also stimulated her work on histories of race, empire, ethnicity and nationalism, and in particular on the role of global and colonial relationships in the formation of communities, classes, genders, sexualities, and nations in India, Europe and the Middle East.
BA, DPhil (Oxon)
Empire and history writing in Britain c. 1750-2012, Manchester University Press, 2013.
‘Whose revolution? Stories and stakeholders of the constitutional movement 1905-11’ in V. Martin and H. Chehabi (eds.) The Iranian constitutional revolution, I.B. Tauris, 2010.
‘War, empire, and the “other”: Iranian-European encounters in the “Napoleonic” era’ in R. Bessel, N. Guyatt, and J. Rendall (eds.) War, empire, and slavery in the revolutionary and Napoleonic period, Palgrave 2010.
Religion, Culture and Politics in Iran: From the Qajars to Khomeini. I. B. Tauris, 2007.
‘“Brothers of the Iranian race”: manhood, nationhood, and modernity in Iran c. 1870-1920’, in S. Dudink, K. Hagemann, and J. Tosh (eds.) Masculinities in politics and war, Manchester UP, 2004.
with M. Maynard, Doing Things Differently? Women’s Studies in the 1990s. Macmillan, 1993.