Kylie Moore-Gilbert


Kylie Moore-Gilbert is an Australian-British academic and expert on Islamic studies. Currently imprisoned in Iran for ten years under a charge of espionage, she was previously a lecturer in Islamic studies at the University of Melbourne's Asia Institute. She has carried out research into revolutions in the Middle East, in particular Bahraini politics and protests.
Moore-Gilbert denies the charges the Iranian government made against her, and no evidence about her alleged crimes have ever been made public. The Australian government has rejected the charges as "baseless and politically motivated".

Life and career

Moore-Gilbert graduated from All Saints' College in Bathurst in 2005. She studied Asian and Middle Eastern Studies at Wolfson College at the University of Cambridge and graduated with first class honours in 2013. In 2017, she obtained a PhD for a thesis entitled
Shiʿi opposition and authoritarian transition in contemporary Bahrain: the shifting political participation of a marginalised majority at the University of Melbourne in 2017.
She is currently Melbourne Early Career Academic Fellow and Lecturer in Islamic Studies at the Asia Institute of the University of Melbourne.

Detention in Iran

The intelligence arm of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps arrested her in September 2018 at Tehran Airport as she was leaving the country after attending a conference. She was flagged as “suspicious” by a fellow academic and by a subject she interviewed for her research. She was subsequently tried and sentenced to ten years in prison for espionage. She was held in Evin Prison, reportedly in solitary confinement. Iranian authorities tried to recruit her as a spy in exchange for her release, which she declined.
On 28 July 2020, Moore-Gilbert is said to have been transferred to Gharchak Women's Prison. In a phone call with Reza Khandan, the husband of jailed human rights lawyer Nasrin Sotoudeh, Moore-Gilbert said she felt hopeless and isolated. “I can’t eat anything. I feel so very hopeless,” Moore-Gilbert said, speaking Persian on the call. “I am so depressed. I don’t have any phone card to call. I’ve asked the prison officers but they didn’t give me a phone card. I call my parents about one month ago.”