Heydari was born and raised in Los Angeles, California. He is currently a seventh-year doctoral candidate in History at the Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studies at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, from where he also received his Master of Arts in History in April 2022. Heydari is an alumnus of the University of California, Los Angeles (B.A., History, French language minor, 2017).

Heydari’s dissertation examines the Union of Iranian Students in France – Union des étudiants iraniens en France (UEIF) – in the postwar period up until and including the Iranian Revolution of 1979. It proposes that politically active, secular internationalist Iranian students in Paris played a definitive role in destabilizing the authoritarian regime of Mohammad Reza Pahlavi (r. 1941–1979) by bringing the attention of international media and human rights organizations to the various humanitarian and political crises in Iran.

He is also interested in the broader currents of modern European intellectual history, especially the contributions of Michel Foucault (power-knowledge and critical discourse studies), Jacques Lacan (psychoanalysis), Jean-François Lyotard (postmodern conceptions of justice), and Étienne Balibar (critique of “equaliberty,” liberalism, and the nation-state).

Heydari spends time reading in critical New Testament studies and the history of theology. He is finding a home in the “apocalyptic turn,” particularly in the work of Martinus C. de Boer, Beverly Roberts Gaventa, and Douglas A Campbell. He is an ordained deacon in the PC(USA) at First Presbyterian Church, Ann Arbor.

Listen to Heydari’s new podcast, Explain Things to Me. He features a wide variety of guests from diverse backgrounds and speaks about theology, productivity, information management, and personal growth.