Kelly J. Shanon , Ph.D. is a historian and is currently a Visiting Scholar at the Institute for Middle East Studies at George Washington University. She was a 2023-2024 National Fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford, and was previously Associate Professor of History and the Executive Director of the Center for Peace, Justice, and Human Rights at Florida Atlantic University. She specializes in the 20th century history of U.S. foreign relations, with a particular focus on the Islamic world, Iran, and women’s human rights. She is the author of U.S. Foreign Policy and Muslim Women’s Human Rights, published by the University of Pennsylvania Press. She has spoken in many academic and public settings, authored articles in venues like the Washington Post and IranSource, and has been interviewed by NPR, Voice of America, The Atlantic, and other media outlets. Dr. Shannon is the recipient of many grants and honors, including the 2019 Stuart L. Bernath Lecture Prize awarded by the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations, one of the highest honors in the field of U.S. diplomatic history. She is currently writing a book on U.S. relations with Iran during the first half of the twentieth century, entitled The Ties That Bind: U.S.-Iran Relations, 1905-1953, which is under contract with Columbia University Press.

Halima Kazem is the Associate Director of Stanford University’s Program in Feminist, Gender, Sexuality studies. Halima’s work is deeply rooted in feminist methodologies and 26 years of working as a journalist, lecturer, human rights researcher, oral historian, and filmmaker. Her research intersects in the areas of gender, empire, human rights, and media with a focus on Afghanistan. Halima’s forthcoming book, A Feminist History of Afghanistan: Resisting the Erasure of Women, unearths and narrates the little-told feminist history of women’s movements in Afghanistan. It will be published in the fall of 2025. Halima is also collaborating with the Hoover Institution as an oral historian and building an oral history archive about the US Afghan war. From 2022-2024 Halima was a University of California Chancellor’s postdoctoral fellow, where she started directing a documentary film about the codification of gender apartheid as a crime under international law.