Mahdi Ganjavi

Mahdi Ganjavi, PhD (University of Toronto), is a distinguished historian of education in the Middle East. A former postdoctoral fellow at the School of Education and Social Policy at Northwestern University, he currently teaches at the Faculty of Information at University of Toronto. His research focuses on intellectual freedom, the transnational history of books, education, print, and translation, as well as the politics of archives and counter-archiving practices in the contemporary Middle East. Ganjavi’s book, Education and the Cultural Cold War in the Middle East: The Franklin Book Programs in Iran (2023), received the Middle East Librarians Association (MELA) 2023 Book Award. His second monograph (co-authored) is entitled Revolutionary Engineers: Learning, Politics, and Activism at Aryamehr University of Technology (forthcoming from MIT Press, 2025). Ganjavi’s scholarly writings, essays, and reviews have appeared in The American Archivist, International Journal of Lifelong Education, Encyclopedia Iranica, Iranian Studies, and Review of Middle East Studies. 

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