This panel examines the history and historiography of US-Iran relations from the Second World War to the early twenty-first century. The research is based on English and Persian sources, including government records, religious archives, oral history interviews, and a range of other published and unpublished sources, both in print and digital formats. The session fuses a number of methodological approaches to capture different vantage points on a multilateral relationship that involved the affairs of states, transnational organizations, and individual Americans and Iranians. This panel's four approaches to the study of US-Iran relations are intellectual history, religion, sociocultural relations, and geopolitics. All four approaches have deep roots in American history and Middle East studies, and they provide insight into the modern history of US-Iran relations.

The session begins with an intellectual history of US-Iran relations to provide a broad historiographic framework and discuss the themes, forms of narration, lines of argumentation, and points of controversy in the literature. While the bulk of these historiographic traditions focus on the period after the Second World War, which is this panel's periodization, the session challenges the typical framing of US-Iran relations as one driven exclusively by conflict and void of consensus. Cognizant of the role that states have played in shaping the contours of the historiography, whether because of America's alliance with Pahlavi Iran during the Cold War or the more recent hostility between the United States and the Islamic Republic, this session's panelists respond critically to state-centric narratives and move beyond them.

During the Cold War era, there were various means by which Americans and Iranians came to know each other and experience shared yet contested histories. For example, the archives of religious organizations reveal the multiple roles that American missionaries played in Iran, and they shed light on the interrelated histories of religion and U.S. foreign relations. The missionaries in Iran were Presbyterian evangelicals, and while religious workers, they made important contributions to Iranian education. They were torn by what one scholar termed the "Christ-culture" dilemma, but the "culture" side of the American missionary spirit appeared in secular garb in the 1960s and 1970s with Peace Corps Iran. Oral history interviews with former Peace Corps volunteers indicate that, despite the program's Cold War ethos of "modernization," many of its volunteers went culturally and politically “native,” forging personal bonds with Iranians, becoming critical of U.S. ties to Pahlavi Iran, and eventually bringing their experiences back with them to the United States. Tasked with educating Iranians, many returned to become leading scholars, educating Americans about Iran and the Middle East.

The session ends by bringing together the various themes to make sense of the legacies of these histories since the Iranian Revolution of 1979. During the last four decades, Americans and Iranians have balanced geopolitical calculations with war, diplomacy, and public opinion, including reactions to popular protest movements such as the current “Woman, Life, Freedom” uprising.