Afsaneh Najmabadi (Persian: افسانه نجم‌آبادی; born 29 December 1946)[2] is an Iranian-born American historian, gender theorist, archivist, and educator.

She is the Francis Lee Higginson Professor of History and of Studies of Women, Gender, and Sexuality at Harvard University.

Najmabadi leads a digital archive and website, Women’s Worlds in Qajar Iran.

The project was awarded its third two-year grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, and it was recognized by the White House Office of Public Engagement in May 2012.

Najmabadi problematizes the categories of sex and gender for analyzing texts outside Western societies.

Within the historical context in other parts of the world, (in her case study, Iran) thinking of gender-based solely on the binary of man/woman masculine/feminine is a concept that was imposed by Victorian values in Modern times.

In the modernist imagination, the premodern woman is envisaged as absent from the public, silent from the print.

This project of producing a new verbal and bodily language and new rules for intercourse suited the heterosocial space and was of course not limited to women.