I am a historian of the human body and the technologies that regulate this body’s livelihood, transformation, and termination in the modern Middle East. In the Medical Humanities Research Institute at Rice University, I am an Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Sawyer Seminar postdoctoral fellow participating in the project “Reimagining Technologies of Care: Racial Health Equity and Data Justice.” I collaborate with scholars, scientists, medical practitioners, and graduate and undergrad students in tackling the myriad ways in which the institution of healthcare uses and reproduces systems of difference and oppression.
Book chapter:
Rashidbeigi S. "Rethinking Techniques of Bleeding in Twentieth Century Iran." In Challenging Stories: Exploring the Intersections between Health and the Humanities (Eds. ET Ewing and P Ganguly). Virginia Tech Publishing, 2024. publishing.vt.edu/site/books/e/10.21061/challenging-stories/
Research Areas
The historical questions that currently interest me are how people of the Middle East understood the material world as mitigated through modern institutions and technologies and how a person confined in a bounded singular physical body identified as "I" in relationship with both the societal and natural environments during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. My current book-length project, tentatively titled Before the Puncture, is a social history of blood transfusion in Iran. I use archival documents and oral histories conducted in Iran to examine the transition from the commodification of blood in a blood market sustained by the urban poor to the construction of altruistic blood donors. I ask what the possibility of moving blood from one body to another has to do with the meaning of citizenship, and what social institutions and historical processes needed to be in place for ordinary women and men to give strangers some of their blood.
