France has demanded immediate consular access to a senior French-Iranian academic who has been arrested in Iran.

Fariba Adelkhah, a prominent researcher in anthropology and social sciences based at the Paris political institute Sciences Po, is believed to have been arrested in June.

The detention risks increasing tension between Paris and Tehran at a critical moment in the crisis over Iran’s nuclear deal. European foreign ministers were meeting in Brussels on Monday in an attempt to preserve the deal, which the US abandoned unilaterally a year ago leading to an accelerating reciprocal withdrawal by Iran.

The French foreign ministry said it had not yet been given “satisfactory” information on the status of Adelkhah, who is seen as one of France’s top academics on Iran.

“The French authorities were recently informed of the arrest of Fariba Adelkhah,” the foreign ministry said in a statement. “France calls on the Iranian authorities to shed full light on Mrs Adelkhah’s situation and repeats its demands, particularly with regard to an immediate authorisation for consular access. No satisfactory response has been received until now.”

Adelkhah is best known for her book Being Modern in Iran, about changes in the country after the 1979 Islamic revolution.

Sciences Po, the elite political science institute where Adelkhah works, confirmed her arrest but refused to comment.

Iranian opposition websites abroad have said Adelkhah disappeared in June. Iran’s state-run Irna news agency quoted a government spokesman as saying on Sunday that a dual national had been arrested, without elaborating. The spokesman, Ali Rabiei, said he could not confirm any information.

Adelkhah is the latest Iranian national also holding a western passport to be arrested in Iran. The UK has advised dual nationals against travel to Iran, saying the “dangers they face include arbitrary detention and lack of access to basic legal rights”.

Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe, a British-Iranian project manager with the Thomson Reuters Foundation, has been jailed in Tehran since 2016 on espionage charges. Dual Iranian-American nationals Siamak Namazi and his father, Baquer, are serving 10-year sentences for espionage in a case that has outraged Washington.

Meanwhile, Xiyue Wang, a Chinese-American researcher at Princeton University, is serving a 10-year sentence for espionage, and a US national, Michael White, 46, was this year sentenced to 10 years.

A French academic, Clotilde Reiss, was detained in Iran for 10 months in 2009-10 before being released in a case that attracted widespread attention at the time.

At a similar time to Reiss’s release, French judicial authorities set free Ali Vakili Rad, who had been convicted of the 1991 murder outside Paris of the ousted shah’s former prime minister Shapour Bakhtiar. The timing led to speculation that a deal may have been struck between the countries over the prisoners, though French authorities denied any exchange.

As news of the latest detention broke, European foreign ministers were fighting to save the Iran nuclear deal after Tehran’s announcements earlier this month that it would boost the enrichment level of uranium above agreed limits, breaking the terms of the landmark accord.

The EU hopes it can persuade Iran to return to the deal, without triggering an investigation into Teheran’s decision to breach terms by enriching uranium.

The bloc’s foreign policy chief, Federica Mogherini, said none of the signatories to the deal considered the breaches to be significant, and so they would not be triggering its dispute mechanism which could lead to further sanctions.

“All the steps that have been taken are reversible, so we hope and we invite Iran to reverse these steps and go back to full compliance with the agreement,” she said.

Jeremy Hunt, the British foreign secretary, said there was a “closing but small window” to keep the deal alive. The UK foreign secretary warned that if Tehran acquired nuclear weapons, other countries in the region would too, leading to a “very toxic and dangerous situation”.

As punishing US economic sanctions hit Iran’s economy, the EU has been attempting to craft a barter mechanism to allow European companies to continue trading with Iran.

So far, 10 EU member states have agreed to take part in the Instex barter system, which allows companies to trade without money changing hands, in an attempt to avoid falling foul of US sanctions.

Mogherini said the EU had not expected these measures would compensate Iran for economic losses incurred by the US decision to withdraw from the deal.

“We are doing our best and we hope that this will be enough for the Iranian public opinion and the Iranian authorities to realise that as we are committed to the full implementation of the JCPOA [joint comprehensive plan of action, the Iran nuclear deal],” she said.