Belle Cheves

Belle Cheves is the Roshan Institute Assistant Professor in Persian and Iranian Studies in the Department of History, the School of Middle Eastern and North African Studies (MENAS), and the School of Global Studies (SGS). Her research focuses on kinship and labor in modern Iran. Her first book, provisionally titled Qajar Affects: Making, Remembering, and Racializing the Family in Iran, investigates the emotional and affective structures that shaped royal and elite household dynamics in nineteenth-century Qajar Iran, and how they are represented in post-Qajar collective memory and nostalgia. Before coming to the University of Arizona, she taught at Bard College and Harvard University, where she received her PhD. Her dissertation, Untidy Households: Kinship, Service, and Affect in Nineteenth-Century Qajar Iran, received the 2024 Association for Iranian Studies’ Mehrdad Mashayekhi Dissertation Award for the best dissertation conducted in Iranian Studies.