Rate My Professor Mohammad Ataie

Mohammad Ataie is a Lecturer in History at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. His academic journey includes a BA in Journalism from Tehran University, a Master's degree in Sociology from Allameh Tabataba’i University, a second Master's degree in Middle Eastern Studies from the American University of Beirut, and a PhD in History from the University of Massachusetts Amherst, where his dissertation was titled "Exporting the 1978-79 Revolution: Pan-Islamic or Sectarian Ecumenism." After completing his doctorate around 2020, he held a Postdoctoral Research Fellowship at the Crown Center for Middle East Studies at Brandeis University. Before pursuing advanced studies, Ataie worked as a journalist and documentary filmmaker across Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iran, Lebanon, and Syria, and served as a diplomatic correspondent at the United Nations. His professional experience informs his teaching and research, where he emphasizes media literacy to provide students with a nuanced, historically grounded perspective on Western media coverage of the Middle East.

Ataie's research centers on the intersection of revolutions, transnationalism, and Muslim clerical networks, particularly the global ramifications of Iran's 1978-79 Revolution. He is finalizing a book manuscript, Clerics in Revolt: Exporting the Iranian Revolution and the Transnationalization of the Revolutionary Guards, drawing from oral history interviews and archival materials in Iran and Lebanon. This work examines Iranian efforts to export the revolution via clerical activism and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps to forge an Islamist international in the 1980s. His scholarship appears in prominent venues, including "Exporting the Iranian Revolution: Ecumenical Clerics in Lebanon" in the International Journal of Middle East Studies (2021), "Order and Disorder: The Politics of Seminaries in Iran" in Middle East Briefs No. 157 (2024), "Brothers, Comrades, and the Quest for the Islamist International: The First Gathering of Liberation Movements in Revolutionary Iran" in The Fate of Third Worldism in the Middle East (2024), "Continuity Despite Revolution: Iran’s Support for Non-State Actors" in Middle East Briefs No. 141 (2021), and "Revolutionary Iran's 1979 Endeavor in Lebanon" in Middle East Policy (2013). Additional contributions include pieces in Foreign Policy, The Guardian, Middle East Eye, LobeLog, Syria Comment, Al Jazeera, and Persian outlets. At UMass Amherst, he teaches courses such as Middle East History II, History of Palestine and Israel, Iran Revolution in Global Perspective, World History to 1500, and World History since 1500.