Mejgan Massoumi

Assistant Professor

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Faculty

Mejgan Massoumi is a historian with research and teaching interests focused on connective histories of media, sound, and popular culture, with a specific focus on Global South cultural circulations in poetry, music, memory, and artistic resistance. She is currently working on her first monograph, a history of radio in Afghanistan that situates the country as an auditory crossroads at the center of Central and South Asia, and the Middle East. By centering global communication technology as both a tool of governance and a platform for sonic dissonance, her work offers new insights into the role of mass media in fragmented nations, the affective power of sound, and the ways in which cultural technology mediates political change. Massoumi’s dissertation, on which this research is based on was awarded the World History Association’s 2023-24 best dissertation prize for best dissertation in world, global, or transnational history. Her work has supported by an American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) Fellowship, the American Institute of Afghanistan Studies (AIAS), and the Social Science Research Council (SSRC) InterAsia Academy, among others.

Dedicated to the preservation of tangible cultural heritage, in 2024-2025, Massoumi pursued an initiative with Stanford University Libraries and Dr. Ryan Perkins (South Asian and Islamic Studies Librarian) to acquire the archive of Afghanistan’s only female master musician to-date, Ustad Farida Mahwash. In January of 2025, she spearheaded an event to inaugurate the archive. Ustad Mahwash’s archive will be digitized and globally accessible through a Stanford University Library Spotlight Exhibit (details forthcoming). In addition, an exciting collaboration with Professor Robert Crews at Stanford University and Dr. Munazza Ebtikar at Oxford University resulted in a multi-year Humanities Seed Grant from Stanford’s Public Humanities Program to create the Sonic Resistance Archive, a digital repository that will collect and preserve resistance music and poetry produced primarily in the Persian-speaking regions of northern Afghanistan since 2021, offering scholars and interested communities access to these invaluable cultural artifacts.

The basis of a second book project derives from the collaborative efforts of the Sonic Resistance Archive, and combines anthropological and historical perspectives to expand existing literature on the peoples and cultures of Afghanistan by further nuancing the making and place of music and its relationship to war, memory, and political dissent. A co-authored essay based on the initial findings of this research is titled “Sonic Narratives of Resistance and Cultural Memory in Afghanistan” (2023) and appears in The New Paradigm, the digital magazine of the Institute for New Global Politics. Another project on film and Afghan globalism explores how Afghan films are reflective of artistic and performative influences found throughout South Asia and the Middle East.

Massoumi received her Ph.D, in History from Stanford University in 2021. Prior to this, she earned a B.A. in Architecture (2001) and a Masters in City Planning (2003), both from the University of California at Berkeley. From 2021 to 2024, she was an inaugural fellow and lecturer in the Civic, Liberal, and Global Education (COLLEGE) Program at Stanford University.

To read more about Mejgan Massoumi, please visit her personal website.

  

Recent Publications

2025 | “Resonating Voices: Afghan Women as Broadcasters and Radio Producers in the 1960s and 1970s. The Careers of Farīda Usmān Anwarī and Anīsa Latīf Durrānī”, International Quarterly for Asian Studies, Special Issue on “Reclaiming Voice – Afghan Women and the Politics of Knowledge Production, Part I”, 56(1), 65-83.

2023 | “Sonic Narratives of Resistance and Cultural Memory in Afghanistan” co-authored with Munazza Ebtikar, The New Paradigm, Institute of New Global Politics, September 4, 2023. Recipient of the Best Article in English Award by the Afghanistan Law and Political Science Association (ALPA), 2024.

2023 | “Radio’s Internationalism: A View from Modern Afghanistan” in South Asia Unbound edited by Elisabeth Leake and Bérénice Guyot-Réchard. Amsterdam University Press.

2022 | “Soundwaves of Dissent: Resistance Through Persianate Cultural Production in Afghanistan”, Iranian Studies, Special Issue on “Canon Formation and Persian Cultural Production in the Twentieth Century”, 55(3), 697-718.

 

Department Member Since: 2025