Experts
Azar Nafisi
Professor, Johns Hopkins University
Obama would be great, and McCain is a paradox. Read More
The Secretary's programs lack the necessary depth to be effective, Nafisi says. Read More
The West should be fighting extremist ideology. Read More
Azar Nafisi on Iranian culture being more poetry than sharia. Read More
They aren't identical, Nafisi says. Read More
Even if you don't agree with her views, Nafisi says, Hirsi Ali should not have to fear for her life for expressing them. Read More
Nafisi's passion was always literature. Religion was an externally imposed reality. Read More
Nafisi isn't making up the facts, she says. Read More
The Prophet's first wife was his boss. Read More
No one should be forced to do something they don't want to do, Nafisi says. Read More
It is not women who make a big deal out of the hijab, Nafisi says. It is the Islamists. Read More
Nafisi responds to her critics who allege that Iran has become freer since Nafisi left. Read More
Nafisi found many of her old students when the book came out. Read More
There is state power, and then there is the power of the writer to resist the tyranny of reality. Read More
At some point, it isn't, Nafisi says. Read More
Nabokov, Nafisi says, was a lot more political than he let on. Read More
Trained as a Nabokov scholar, Azar Nafisi formed a very personal bond to the writer's works. Read More
Nafisi on the "portable world." Read More
Nafisi is puzzled by the simplification and self-righteousness she encounters in America. Read More
Iran, Nafisi says, is a very paradoxical place. Read More
About Azar Nafisi
Azar Nafisi is best known as the author of the national bestseller Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books, which electrified its readers with a compassionate and often harrowing portrait of the Islamic revolution in Iran and how it affected one university professor and her students. The book has spent over 117 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list. Azar Nafisi’s new book, Things I Have Been Silent About: Memories, a memoir about her mother, was published in January 2009.
Azar Nafisi is a Visiting Professor and the executive director of Cultural Conversations at the Foreign Policy Institute of Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies in Washington, DC, where she is a professor of aesthetics, culture, and literature, and teaches courses on the relation between culture and politics. Azar Nafisi held a fellowship at Oxford University, teaching and conducting a series of lectures on culture and the important role of Western literature and culture in Iran after the revolution in 1979. She has taught at the University of Tehran, the Free Islamic University and Allameh Tabatabaii.