Research interests
- Academic Freedom and Institutional Autonomy
- Comparative Politics of Higher Education
- University Governance and Public Missions
- Comparative, International and Development Education
- Democracy and Democratic Backsliding
Zahra Jafarova is a Canadian Postdoctoral Research Award (CPRA) Fellow at the School of International Development and Global Studies, University of Ottawa. Her research examines academic freedom as a fundamental human right, focusing on how political transformations, particularly democratic backsliding, and institutional conditions shape the freedom to teach, research, and dissent across higher education systems worldwide.
She holds a PhD in Higher Education from the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, University of Toronto (2025), where she was an SSHRC Doctoral Fellow. Zahra's dissertation analyzed the political and institutional conditions shaping academic freedom across 163 countries from 1902 to 2017, paired with comparative case studies of Hungary and Turkey drawn from 51 interviews. Her work appears in Comparative Education Review, Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education, and Globalisation, Societies and Education.
Zahra has also held research appointments at the University of Cambridge, where she was a team member of an ESRC-funded project examining higher education, states of precarity and conflict in the Global North and Global South (2021–2024), and at Boston College, where she contributed to the Future of Internationalization Partnership (2023–2025). She has held fellowships with NYU's Mellon/Scholars at Risk Academic Freedom Fellowship and the Institute for Humane Studies at George Mason University.
Zahra is also a Research Associate at the Centre for the Study of Canadian and International Higher Education and a Sessional Lecturer at the University of Toronto.