Iran in Motion: Mobility, Space, and the Trans-Iranian Railway

Completed in 1938, the Trans-Iranian Railway connected Tehran to Iran’s two major bodies of water: the Caspian Sea in the north and the Persian Gulf in the south. Iran’s first national railway, it produced and disrupted various kinds of movement—voluntary and forced, intended and unintended, on different scales and in different directions—among Iranian diplomats, tribesmen, migrant laborers, technocrats, railway workers, tourists and pilgrims, as well as European imperial officials alike. Iran in Motion: Mobility, Space, and the Trans-Iranian Railway (Stanford University Press, 2021) tells the hitherto unexplored stories of these individuals as they experienced new levels of mobility.
Mikiya Koyagi is Assistant Professor at the Department of Middle Eastern Studies, The University of Texas at Austin. His research explores mobility and space in Iranian and inter-Asian history. His first book, Iran in Motion: Mobility, Space, and the Trans-Iranian Railway, was published from Stanford University Press in 2021. He is currently working on a new project on Japan’s Islamic Pan-Asianism since the late nineteenth century.
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