About
Qualia House LLC is the parent company of the ventures founded by Pardis Mahdavi, PhD.
01 The name
Qualia are the felt qualities of experience.
They describe how a person experiences what they experience: what something is like from the inside.
Pardis Mahdavi, PhD, chose the name because education has focused on what people learn, the facts, the content and the credentials, and far less on how they learn it. Information is now easy to supply. Qualia House exists to give the same attention to experience, judgment and the way people come to know what they know.
- Founder
- Pardis Mahdavi, PhD
- Essay
- Qualia House, in The Story Gap, 3 October 2026 (opens in a new tab)
02 The founder
Pardis Mahdavi, PhD, is an anthropologist, an author and a former university president.
Pardis Mahdavi, PhD, is an anthropologist, an author and a former university president and provost. She holds a PhD from Columbia University.
She served as the 19th president of the University of La Verne, as provost and executive vice president of the University of Montana, and as dean of social sciences at Arizona State University. Earlier she was professor and chair of anthropology and dean of women at Pomona College, and acting dean of the Josef Korbel School of International Studies at the University of Denver.
She is Executive Director of the Executive Leadership Academy at the Center for Studies in Higher Education at the University of California, Berkeley. She serves on the boards of Lumina Foundation and the Human Trafficking Legal Center, and she is a lifetime member of the Council on Foreign Relations.
Her research has been supported by fellowships from the Social Science Research Council, the American Council of Learned Societies and the Woodrow Wilson Center.
03 The parent company
Qualia House has three roles.
- 01
Qualia House is the parent company of the ventures founded by Pardis Mahdavi, PhD.
- 02
Qualia House rethinks education and the study of knowledge around how people experience what they learn.
- 03
Each venture in the house carries out its own work under its own name.
04 Books
Her six books cover labor, migration, gender and identity.
- 2023Book of QueensHachette Books
- 2021HyphenBloomsbury
- 2016Crossing the Gulf: Love and Family in Migrant LivesStanford University Press
- 2013From Trafficking to TerrorRoutledge
- 2011Gridlock: Labor, Migration, and Human Trafficking in DubaiStanford University Press
- 2008Passionate Uprisings: Iran’s Sexual RevolutionStanford University Press