Cogut Institute for the Humanities

Amir Tamaddon ’25 is an undergraduate concentrating in history. He investigates “modernity” as a set of interconnected conditions of being and attempts to explain their intellectual genealogies. In his thesis, titled “Political Theology of ‘Authenticity’: Messianic Self-Craft and Identity-Formation in Revolutionary Iranian Thought,” he studies the genealogy of the question of authenticity, a discourse that permeated the thought of major Iranian intellectuals such as Ali Shari’ati, Darioush Shayegan, and Ahmad Fardid in the years preceding the Iranian Revolution (1979). His thesis breaks from political-economy and culturalist perspectives on the Iranian Revolution, questioning and complicating “the triumph of nativism” as an explanation for the preoccupation with authenticity. It then moves beyond the field of history to rethink the (ir)relevances of the question of authenticity and (secularized) messianic thinking for Iranian political thought today. He reads mystical Sufi poetry, especially Rumi’s. He finds the role of education in human and child development fascinating and in need of more philosophical exploration. His historical interests include occasionalism, neoplatonism, pragmatism, psychoanalysis, the nexus of politics and spirituality, contemporary right-wing politics, and the history of capitalism. He regularly contemplates the nature of historical knowledge and wonders about the possibility of new “big histories.”