Born in Iran, Azar Nafisi is a visiting fellow, professorial lecturer, and the director of The Dialogue Project: The Culture of Democracy in Muslim Societies at the Foreign Policy Institute of Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) in Washington DC.

A professor of aesthetics, culture and literature, Dr. Nafisi held a fellowship at Oxford University teaching and conduction a series of lectures on culture and the important role of Western literature and culture in Iran after the revolution in 1979. She taught at the University of Tehran, the Free Islamic University, and Allameh Tabatabaii before coming to the United States, earning national respect and international recognition for advocating on behalf of Iran’s intellectuals, youth and especially young women. She was expelled from the University of Tehran for refusing to wear the mandatory Islamic veil in 1981, and did not resume teaching until 1987.

Dr. Nafisi conducted workshops in Iran for women students on the relationship between culture and human rights; the material culled from these workshops formed the basis of a new human rights education curricula. She has lectured and written extensively in English and Persian on the political implications of literature and culture as well as on the human rights of Iranian women and girls and the important role they play in the process of change for pluralism and an open society in Iran and other Muslim societies. She has been consulted on issues related to Iran and human rights in general both by the policy makers and various human rights organizations in the U.S. and elsewhere.

Her writings included Anti-Terra: A Critical Study of Vladimir Nabakov’s Novels (1994) and chapters for Muslim Women and Politics of Participation (1997), Eye of the Storm: Women in Post-Revolutionary Iran (1992), and Religious Fundamentalisms and the Human Rights of Women, (1999). Her op-eds and other articles have been published in The New York Times, Washington Post, The New Republic, and The Wall Street Journal, and her cover story, “The Veiled Threat: The Iranian Revolution’s Woman Problem” published in The New Republic (February 22, 1999), has been reprinted in several languages.

She is currently teaching on the relation between culture and politics at SAIS and her critically acclaimed, award winning best-seller Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books, (Random House, April 2003) has been translated into thirty-two languages.

Additional Resources: View video of Ms. Nafisi accepting her achievement award at the AILF event March 18, 2005, in Washington, DC. http://www.bookbrowse.com/index.cfm?page=author&authorID=910