seminar on Iran, Islam and modernity. Abbas Milani. Part I. April 10, 2016 The seminar, conducted in Persian, will first inquire into the nature of modernity, debates in Iran and in the west about its origins, desirability and constituent elements, followed by a discussion of the rise of Shiism, its…
Dr. Abbas Milani is the director of Iranian Studies at Stanford University. He is the author of The Shah, Eminent Persians: The Men and Women Who Made Modern Iran, 1941-1979, The Persian Sphinx: Amir Abbas Hoveyda and the Riddle of the Iranian Revolution, Lost Wisdom: Rethinking Modernity in Iran, Encounters with Modernity, On Democracy and Socialism, and Tales of two Cities: a Persian Memoir.
Abbas Milani is the Hamid & Christina Moghadam Director of Iranian Studies and Adjunct Professor at the Center on Democracy, Development and Rule of Law at the Freeman Spogli Institute at Stanford University. He has been one of the founding co-directors of the Iran Democracy Project and a research fellow at the Hoover Institution. His expertise is U.S.-Iran relations as well as Iranian cultural, political, and security issues. Until 1986, he taught at Tehran University’s Faculty of Law and Political Science, where he was also a member of the Board of Directors of the university’s Center for International Relations. After moving to the United States, he was for fourteen years the Chair of the Political Science Department at the Notre Dame de Namur University. For eight years, he was a visiting Research Fellow in University of California, Berkeley’s Middle East Center.