Scholars

Belle Cheves is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Levy Institute Research Program of Gender Equality and the Economy. She studies the history of the Middle East, with a particular focus on gender and labor in nineteenth and twentieth-century Iran. She recently completed her PhD in History and Middle Eastern Studies and Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Harvard, with a dissertation titled "Untidy Households: Kinship, Service, and Affect in Nineteenth-Century Qajar Iran." At the Levy Institute, Belle is developing her research on how women's labor was compensated in nineteenth and early twentieth-century imperial households in Iran, and how this compensation intertwined with the development of economic and political networks tied to kinship and racial and ethnic categories.