Dr. Zahra Lotfi earned a Ph.D. in the History of Iran from Shahid Beheshti University, where she specialized in the political and social histories of Iran and Afghanistan from the medieval period to the contemporary era. Following the completion of her doctorate in 2014, she taught the history of Afghanistan at a university in Kabul, employing critical and analytical approaches to the study of Afghanistan’s past.
Since immigrating to the US, Lotfi has been continuing her scholarly activities in a variety of ways. She spent a year as a visiting scholar at Northeastern University, where she presented her research on honor crimes in Afghanistan. Boston University awarded her two travel grants: the first supported her research on the representation and roles of women in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Afghan historical sources, and the second enabled her to travel to Spain to record an oral history interview with a survivor of the 1998 Mazar-e Sharif massacre.
Lotfi is the co-editor of My City Was a Sparkling Jewel: Voices of Newcomer Youth from Afghanistan, presented at the 2023 Oral History Association Annual Meeting. Her chapter proposal, “Gendered Memory and Unofficial Commemoration: Hazara Women’s Oral Testimonies of the 1998 Mazar-e-Sharif/Balkh Province Massacre,” has been accepted by the editors for the forthcoming volume, Memorializing Atrocities: A Study of Public Memory and Commemoration of Mass Violence.
Dr. Lotfi’s current research continues her examination of the August 1998 massacre of Hazaras in Mazar-e Sharif and Balkh Province by the Taliban. Over the past three years, she has conducted 79 oral history interviews with survivors and eyewitnesses living in Afghanistan and across the diaspora. These testimonies document experiences of violence, imprisonment, forced displacement, and survival, preserving a valuable oral history archive of the massacre and its aftermath.
Drawing on these survivor and eyewitness interviews, Lotfi is building an archive to add to the historical documentation of mass violence against the Hazara community. Her research explores how survivors remember, narrate, and transmit experiences of atrocity and is contributing to scholarship in oral history, memory studies, and genocide studies. By preserving firsthand accounts, her work seeks to deepen historical understanding of one of the most devastating episodes in Afghanistan’s recent history to ensure that survivors’ voices become part of the enduring historical record.
Advisor: Ken MacLean
Education:
- Ph.D. in the History of Iran from Shahid Beheshti University, 2014
