Sayyara Huseynli
PhD in World History
Sayyara is a second-year Ph.D. student in the World History program at Northeastern University. Her research interest is women’s history of education, equity in museums, and cultural forms of education. She examines these topics from the late imperial Russian period in the Muslim Caucasus, particularly in Azerbaijan, starting in 1850, through the establishment of Soviet rule in the 1920s. She is also curious about the clashes between the Western and socialist perceptions of education and the local ways of knowing in the lives of ordinary women. The public representation of these subject matters is also an area of study she aspires to contribute to. Methodologically, she is experimenting with decolonization, and global history and using art as primary sources. Sayyara completed her master’s degree in Museum Education at Tufts University and her bachelor’s at the Azerbaijan State University of Economics. During her studies and after, she has engaged in numerous public-facing research projects, leading to exhibitions, online lessons, blog posts, and toolkits. One of these earlier projects was the historical research on Azerbaijani poets persecuted for their literary works. In 2018, the selected findings from this work became part of an exhibition by Shilpa Gupta called “For in Your Tongue I Cannot Fit”. The conclusions of similar research at Boston Children’s Museum were published in the museum’s blog – Hidden Object Highlight: Sini, سینی and featured an Iranian serving platter in 2021. During her first year at Northeastern University, she collaborated with Dr. Philip Thai for East Asian Studies and Dr. Malcolm Purinton on The World from 1945 courses as a Teaching Assistant. In the summer of 2024, Sayyara contributed to the work of the Reckonings Project team as a Research Assistant. While there, she co-created a Community Agreement Toolkit with the project team, and feedback from the scholars of the 2024 Summer Enrichment Program at Freedom House.
Cohort: 2023
Research Interests: Women’s history of education, equity in museums, and cultural forms of education
Most Recent Degree: MA in Museum Education, Tufts University; BA, Azerbaijan State University of Economics