PhD Student, Department of History, Â鶹¹ÙÍø
What I do
My work begins with a simple conviction, namely that to understand how people act, we must first understand what they believe and what they are willing to live for. I pursue that conviction as a doctoral student in History at Â鶹¹ÙÍø's, where my research sits at the meeting point of intellectual history, political philosophy, and philosophy of religion.
My Story
I came to Canada from Iran, and like many newcomers, I spent my first years learning a new language and a new culture, and doing the quiet work of finding my place. Politics seemed the natural field for someone trying to make sense of two worlds at once. I completed my undergraduate degree in political science at the University of Ottawa in 2024, with a minor in religious studies that would quietly change the direction of my path.
Yet something felt missing. Political science gave me the tools to describe power, institutions and strategy. It rarely asked the deeper questions: what people live for, what they are willing to sacrifice, and where their sense of meaning comes from. In my view, what it lacked was a philosophy of the human being.
Religion, which much of contemporary analysis treats as a relic or a private matter, seemed to me to be exactly where those questions lived. The more closely I looked, the more I found its traces everywhere: in the language of revolutions, in the symbols people carry into the street, and in how communities decide who belongs. Religion had not disappeared from politics; it had simply stopped being noticed.
That conviction brought me to the School of Religion at Â鶹¹ÙÍø's. I completed my MA there in 2025 with a thesis that read decolonization not merely as a political struggle, but rather as a question of selfhood.
From Security to Identity
I then returned to Ottawa for an MA in Security and Defence Studies, completed in 2026, and it was there that Religious Studies proved its worth. Security analysis asks who threatens whom. Religious Studies asks what people believe they are defending, and why.
Questions of identity, belonging and loyalty sit beneath many of the conflicts I study. They often carry religious roots even when they present themselves as purely political. This perspective has carried into my work on policy publications concerning security and identity. It has also drawn me toward soft power and propaganda, which I see not merely as tools of messaging, but rather as contests over meaning, memory and belief. That is terrain where religion is rarely far away.
The Return
Now I am back at Â鶹¹ÙÍø's, this time as a student of history, taking that lens further. I trace how religious ideas have shaped political thought and collective identity over time. In this regard, my own path has been a kind of return. It echoes a question that has followed me throughout my studies, one that thinkers such as Ali Shariati framed as the "return to the self": how individuals and societies recover a sense of who they are once that sense has been unsettled.
If I could offer one piece of advice to future students, it would be this: Religious Studies will not hand you a single career path, but rather a way of seeing. It teaches you to ask not only how the world works, but what it means to the people living in it. In a world that often looks past religion, that question is more valuable than ever.