Seema Golestaneh is Assistant Professor of Near Eastern Studies at Cornell University. She holds a PhD in anthropology from Columbia University, and her research investigates contemporary trends in Islamic thought in the Persian-speaking world. Her first book, Unknowing and the Everyday, traces the social and material life of mystical knowledge in post-1979 Iran. Her new project examines intellectual histories of Afghanistan, with a focus on Islamic leftist thought of the 1980s and 1990s.