Mikiya Koyagi

Barbro Klein Fellow, SCAS.
Assistant Professor of Middle Eastern Studies, The University of Texas at Austin

Mikiya Koyagi is a historian of modern Iran and inter-Asian connections, with a particular emphasis on
mobility and space. He received his Ph.D. in History from The University of Texas at Austin in 2015.
After teaching at New York University for three years as an Assistant Professor of Middle Eastern and
Islamic Studies, he returned to his alma mater in 2018, where he currently teaches.

His first book, Iran in Motion: Mobility, Space, and the Trans-Iranian Railway (Stanford University
Press, 2021), won the 2022 Saidi-Sirjani Book Award and received an honorable mention from the
Sharmin and Bijan Mossavar-Rahmani Center for Iran and Persian Gulf Studies Book Award. The book
has been translated into Persian as Iran dar Harakat: Jabeja’i, Faza, va Rah Ahan-e Sarasari-ye Iran
(Shirazeh: 2022). His articles have appeared in various journals, including the International Journal of
Middle East Studies, Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East, Modern Asian
Studies, Iranian Studies, and the Journal of World History. He is currently working on two projects,
where the first explores Japanese encounters with the Middle East, and the second looks at the history
of the Indo-Afghan-Iranian borderlands since the nineteenth century.

While at SCAS, Koyagi will work on the history of the geographical imaginary of Asia as a vast civiliza-
tional space that stretched from imperial Japan to the Islamic Middle East.

Mikiya Koyagi is in residence in the autumn of 2023.
This information is accurate as of the academic year 2023-24.