BA in Political Science (2002)

MA in International Relations (2005)

MA in Middle Eastern Studies (2007)

Phd in International History (2011)

Vittorio Felci is a Lecturer of History and a History Minor Advisor at the College of Liberal Arts, Wenzhou-Kean University. He earned a PhD in International History in 2011 from the University of Florence. An expert on the Middle East and North Africa, Felci has worked extensively on the international history of Iran during the Cold War and, more recently, on oral history as concept and practice. He has published in international journals such as "Foreign Affairs", "Diplomacy & Statecraft", "The International Journal of African Historical Studies" and “Oral History”. His first monograph, Scacco allo Scia’: l’Iran e la rivoluzione dei diritti umani negli Stati Uniti e in Gran Bretagna, focused on the exogenous causes of the 1979 Iranian revolution and was published in 2023 by the Italian publishing house FrancoAngeli.

My research interests revolve around two separate areas. As for the first, I have recently kicked off a new project focusing on the relations between the Soviet bloc and Iran during the Cold War. This promises to be an important contribution to an existing scholarship that has centred upon Iran’s relations with the West, and has drawn almost exclusively on Western primary sources, for too many years. This research draws on the analysis of Hungarian documentary sources from the National Archives of Hungary (MNL). It is supported by the Tempus Public Foundation in Budapest and the University of Szeged in Szeged, Hungary.

I am also interested in oral history and, in particular, in “shared/sharing authority” as concept and practice. Michael Frisch coined the term “shared authority” to describe the practice of history writing in dialogue with interlocutors. While Frisch saw “shared authority” as intrinsic to oral history interviewing, he suggested a more expansive view of the concept, in which narrators might play a crucial role in research design, final oral history texts etc., a move he argued would result in a more engaged, grounded public history. Scholars who later introduced the concept of sharing authority expanded upon Frisch’s thinking. This reformulation, they argue, highlights the ongoing collaborative process between narrator and oral historian, which is critical to every step of the oral history process. Placing “shared/sharing authority” center-stage, my current research offers a reflection on this dual concept (and practice) in my experience of environmental oral historian in Khartoum, Sudan.

Monograph

Felci V. (2023). Scacco allo Scia’. L’Iran e la rivoluzione dei diritti umani negli Stati Uniti e in Gran Bretagna, 1972-1976 (Check to the Shah: Iran and the Human Rights Revolution in the United States and Great Britain, 1972-1976) (Milano: FrancoAngeli).

Peer-reviewed articles in international journals

• Felci V., Altom A. and Hog Hansen Anders (in press). “Reflecting Upon Authority in the Creation of the “We are Proud of Them” Story Map”. Oral History 52(1): 81-95.
• Felci V. and Altom A. (2022). “An Oral History Study of Social Memory and Flood Resilience in the Island of Tuti in Greater Khartoum, Sudan”. International Journal of frican Historical Studies 55(3): 347-372.
• Felci V. (2019). “A Latter-day Hitler': Anti-Shah Activism and British Policy Towards Iran, 1974–79”. Diplomacy and Statecraft 30(3): 515-535.

ArcGIS Story Mapping

• Felci V. (2022). “‘We are Proud of Them’: The Role of the Past in Tuti’s Tradition Against Flooding”. Available at: https://storymaps.arcgis.com/stories/1a53f4f846db4c9b8da980e13911537b

Op-ed in Foreign Affairs

Felci V. (2015). “Start Spreading the News. How the Iranian Media Reports on the Nuclear Deal”. Foreign Affairs, August 2015.

Worlds of History

US History  1877 to Present