Nayereh Esfahlani Tohidi (Persian: نیره توحیدی; born 1951)[2][1] is an Iranian-born American professor, researcher, and academic administrator.
[3] She is also a research associate at the Center for Near Eastern Studies of University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), where she had coordinated the Bilingual Lecture Series on Iran since 2003.
[4] She specializes in the fields of gender, Islam, feminism, modernity, and democracy; ethnicity and ethno-religious movements; and human and women's rights in the Persianate and Turkic Societies of the Middle East, the Caucasus and Central Asia.
Her teaching and research areas include sociology of gender, religion (Islam), ethnicity and democracy in the Middle East and post-Soviet Central Eurasia, especially Iran and Azerbaijan.
In 2015, she was awarded a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities to develop and launch a minor in Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies in California State University, Northridge.