Zahra LotfiDr. Lotfi was born in Afghanistan, raised in Iran, and returned to Afghanistan in 2010. She was a professor of Afghanistan History at the University of Kabul, specializing in Iranian and Afghan history. She moved to the US in 2016 after her family obained a Special Immigrant Visa for Afghans - a visa for people who were employed by/on behalf of the U.S. Government. Since then she, her husband and two daughters have called Boston, MA their home. As of January 2022, Dr. Lotfi is a proud new US citizen. Dr. Lotfi's Ph.D. dissertation entitled "The People's Democratic Party of Afghanistan: From Inception to Political Supremacy, 1919-1978" focused on examining the progression of the political transition in the middle of the 20th century. In the academic year 2018-2019, she was a visiting scholar at Northeastern University where she delivered a public presentation called "An Increase in Honor Crime in Afghanistan." In 2018, she was awarded a travel grant from Boston University to further investigate the representation and roles of women in 18th and 19th-century Afghan historical texts.
Dr. Lotfi's most current project is "The Massacre of Hazaras in Mazar-e- Sharif by the Taliban in 1998." This oral history collection includes the individual accounts of the survivors of that horrific event many refer to as the Hazara genocide. Her hope is that documenting the untold stories of the witnesses of the massacre of Mazar-e- Sharif will amplify the voices of the Hazara people, who have been directly impacted by ethnic and religious injustice in Afghanistan since 1893. Read More Read Less