Sara Hassani

Sara Hassani is Assistant Professor of Political Science and Women's and Gender Studies at Providence College. She is a political theorist, whose research draws on qualitative methods, history, anthropology, feminist and critical theory, affect theory, and critical suicide studies to examine questions of power, embodiment, gender and self-destructive violence, and protest with a regional focus on Central and Western Asia. 

Hassani's first book manuscript, In the Wake of Woman: The Politics of the Morality Police, builds on her 2023 APSA award-winning dissertation and investigates the high rates of self-immolation among young women and girls in the Islamic Republic of Iran. Through rigorous historical research and interviews with survivors of self-immolation, as well as with their doctors, caregivers, advocates, families, friends, and neighbors, it offers a carefully contextualized reconstruction of the experiences of women who are typically dismissed as irrational in the official discourse and largely neglected by Western scholars. The Morality Police unsettles prevailing notions of this institution and theorizes its expansive reach, illuminating the multidimensional operations of police power enacted on women's bodies in their daily and intimate lives and the unconventional political agency they exercise under and against that police power. In 2026, Hassani will complete her book manuscript as a Visiting Scholar in the History of Consciousness Department at the University of California, Santa Cruz. 

Her article, "Affective Resistance Against Sovereign Erasure: Historicizing the (Maternal) and Feminist Politics of Shared Grief in Iran's Woman, Life, Freedom Uprising," was recently published in Theory & Event. She has previously published in peer-reviewed journals including Central Asian Survey and The International Feminist Journal of Politics. She has also contributed to numerous print and online media outlets, including Outlook India, Town Hall, The Huffington Post, Foreign Policy Association, and The New York Times, among others. 

Building on a longstanding commitment to community involvement and outreach, most recently, Hassani delivered an Address to the “General Debate” of the 23r Meeting – 60th Session of the Human Rights Council, UNHRC in Geneva Switzerland on behalf of a transnational women's advocacy non-profit.