20th century

Isabelle S. Headrick is a PhD candidate in history at the University of Texas at Austin. She works on the global modern education movement and its interaction with Iranian, Jewish, global French, and family histories. Specifically, her research focuses on a family of French-educated, Jewish school directors. Three generations of this family lived in Iran for seventy years (1908-1978) and worked during that time for the Alliance Israélite Universelle, a transnational Jewish educational organization. Through this family’s documented experiences, she examines changes in Iranian society relating to Jewish Iranians, girls, and women. Her article, “A Family in Iran: Women Teachers, Minority Integration, and Family Networks in the Jewish Schools of the Alliance Israélite Universelle in Iran, 1900–1950,” was published in October 2019 in The Journal of the Middle East and Africa.