The Team

Karena Avedissian is the Project Assistant for the MCA project. She received her BA in Political Science from the University of California, Riverside and her MSc in Contemporary Russian and East European Studies from the University of Birmingham. She has worked for various NGOs in the US, Russia and Armenia, assisting on a number of projects there. Her interests include nationalism, ethnic and identity issues of the post-Soviet Caucasus as well as youth cultural practice in the former Soviet Union. She joined the MCA team in September 2007.

Dr Aptin Khanbaghi is a Senior Researcher at the Institute and Project Team Leader for the MCA project. An historian of religion by training, he received his MA from McGill University in Comparative Religion and his PhD from Cambridge University in Iranian Studies. Before joining AKU-ISMC, Dr Khanbaghi held research and teaching positions in Europe and North America. His areas of academic interest include: religious minorities in West Asia; Iran under the Mongols and the Safavids; and cultural and commercial exchanges between Europe and Asia. His book titled The Fire, the Star and the Cross: Minority Religions in Medieval and Early Modern Iran was released in 2006.