Weeda Mehran

Following her work as a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in terrorism and media research at Georgia State, Dr. Weeda Mehran accepted a position as a faculty member with the The University of Exeter.

Dr. Meharan completed her Ph.D. at the University of Cambridge in the Department of Politics and International Studies.  In 2007, she obtained a master’s degree in Sociology from the University of Oxford as the first Afghan woman to graduate from Oxford University.  She also holds an M.A. in International Conflict Analysis from Kent University.  Mehran earned her B.A. with honors in Environment and Society & Sociology from the University of Toronto.

Dr. Mehran was a 2018 VoxPol visiting scholar at Dublin City University where she conducted research on extremists’ media strategies. Her research takes a multidisciplinary approach to studying propaganda campaign across a number of extremists groups such as Taliban, the Islamic State, Al Qaeda, Tahrik-e Taliban of Pakistan and Lashkar-e Taiba.

Mehran has worked with a number of organizations such as Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission, Afghanistan Public Policy Research, Free and Fair Election Foundation of Afghanistan, Integrity Watch Afghanistan, Afghanistan Research, Evaluation Unit, and a number of UN organizations (e.g. UNWomen, UNDP).  She has written numerous policy reports on issues in Afghanistan.  She worked as a visiting scholar at the Institute for Peace Research and Security Policy in 2016, Hamburg University.  Mehran also served as Supervisor in the Department of Politics at the University of Cambridge.

Mehran is fluent in Persian, speaks advanced Pashtu and French, as well as intermediate German and basic Arabic. She has working knowledge of STATA, SPSS, R, Gephi, Ucinet, LIWC, and NVivo.