In this interview Ervand Abrahamian, one of the preeminent Iranian historians of his generation, speaks to Eskandar Sadeghi-Boroujerdi about his fifty-year career and the ideas that have shaped both popular and scholarly understandings of the events, political organizations, and movements that defined Iran and its politics in the twentieth century.

Whether it be his work on the communist Tudeh Party, the Iranian labor movement, the CIA-MI6 orchestrated coup of 1953, or Ayatollah Khomeini and the question of populism, Abrahamian’s writings continue to set the tone for debates in both Iran and the West.

Of equal importance is Abrahamian’s contribution to the historiography of modern Iran, in which he reinterpreted the methods of Marxist historians such as Christopher Hill, Eric Hobsbawm, and E. P. Thompson, among others. Abrahamian’s work unpacks the meaning of class, contestation, and social change in a country whose history has all too often been interpreted with either Orientalist fantasy or nativist nostalgia. His books are bestsellers in Iran, where they are read and discussed widely. He is currently in the process of writing a monograph on the history of the Iranian Revolution of 1979.