Mehrdad Alipour is a scholar of Islamic studies. His research focuses on Islamic legal and cultural traditions, legal theory, Shi'i studies, and Iranian intellectual history. He is, in particular, interested in the transformation of Islamic cultural and legal traditions concerning body politics, gender, and sexuality in the premodern and modern eras. In September 2022, Mehrdad started his NWO Veni project titled "Beyond Binaries: Intersex in Islamic Legal Tradition" at the Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies at the University of Utrecht. This study will examine intersex identity as a third sex and/or gender in (Shi'i) Islamic legal tradition between the 14th and early 20th centuries.
 
Before joining Utrecht, Mehrdad was a postdoctoral researcher at the Goethe University of Frankfurt (September 2020 - July 2022), participating in a two-year project entitled "Wege zu einer Ethik" which studied classical Islamic thoughts and how they might be employed to tackle modern issues concerning gender and sexuality in Muslim communities. Having graduated from the Seminary of Qom (Iran), in 2017-2021, Mehrdad pursued his doctoral research in Arab and Islamic Studies at the University of Exeter (U.K.). His PhD dissertation entitled "Negotiating Homosexuality in Contemporary Shi'i Islam" is an academic exploration of discursive space(s) for debating homosexuality in modern Shi'i discourse, based on a legal-hermeneutical analysis of Islamic law.