Senzil Nawid

Senzil Nawid was born in Kabul Afghanistan. She received her Ph.D. in Near Eastern Studies from the University of Arizona in 1987. She has taught courses in history and Persian language and literature at the University of Arizona and has been a guest lecturer at the University of Michigan, the University of Chicago, and New York University. The focus of her research is political, social, and cultural history of Afghanistan in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. She is also interested in Afghan women’s history and legal rights. She has conducted archival and library research in Afghanistan, Great Britain, France, India, Pakistan, Switzerland, and the United States. In her work, she has used primary and secondary sources in Persian, Pashtu, Urdu, Arabic, and French. Her book, Religious Response to Social Change in Afghanistan: King Aman-Allah and the Afghan Ulama, 1919-1929, was published in 1999 and was translated into Persian and published in Afghanistan in 2010. She has also published numerous articles in scholarly journals and encyclopedias, as well as chapters in a number of edited books, one of which was “Afghan Women under Marxism.” She is currently working on a book-length manuscript titled, The King’s Physician: An English Women’s View of the Court and Harem of Amir Abd al-Rahman of Afghanistan. Research for this project was conducted in London and Switzerland under the auspices of the American Institute of Afghanistan Studies. She has presented much of her research in national and international conferences, most recently in London at the international conference “Mountstuart Elphinstone and the Historical Foundations of Afghanistan Studies.”