Dr.  Abbas Milani is the Hamid & Christina Moghadam Director of Iranian Studies at Stanford University and a Professor (by courtesy) in Division of International, Comparative, and Area Studies. 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. Till 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.

Dr. Milani came to Stanford ten years ago, when he became the founding director of the Iranian Studies Program. He also worked with two colleagues to launch the Iran Democracy Project at the Hoover Institution. He has published more than twenty books and two hundred articles and book reviews in scholarly magazines, journals, and newspapers. Amongst his books are: Modernity and Its Foes in Iran (in Persian, Gardon Press, 1998); The Persian Sphinx: Amir Abbas Hoveyda and the Riddle of the Iranian Revolution (in both Persian and English, Mage, 2000; Akhtaran, 2001); Lost Wisdom: Rethinking  Modernity in Iran (Mage 2004); King of Shadows (in Persian, Ketob Corp. 2004); The Myth of the Great Satan (Hoover Institution Press, 2010); Eminent Persians, Two Volumes (Syracuse University Press). His latest book is The Shah (Palgrave MacMillan, 2011). Milani has translated numerous books and articles into both Persian and English. His articles have been published in a variety of journals and papers, including The Washington Quarterly, the Encyclopedia Iranica, the Hoover Digest, Iranshenasi, the Journal of the Middle East, Middle East Journal, the New York Review of Books, and the Times Literary Supplement. His work has been translated into Persian, French, German, Italian, Polish, Spanish, Portuguese, Pashtun and Arabic. In preparation for his books, The Shah and Eminent Persians, he has accumulated or used more than fifty thousand pages of archival material that will soon be available at Stanford for use by other scholars and students.