Afshin Molavi is a senior fellow at the New America Foundation, a non-partisan think tank, where he writes widely on the politics and economics of Middle East states. A journalist and author, his articles and commentaries have appeared in the New York Times, the Financial Times, Businessweek, the Washington Post, Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, the Journal of Commerce, National Geographic, and several academic and specialty publications. A former Dubai-based correspondent for the Reuters news agency and Tehran-based correspondent for the Washington Post, Molavi frequently comments on Middle East affairs in the world’s media, including BBC, CNN, and NPR.

He is the critically acclaimed author of the “Soul of Iran,” (W.W Norton), which was described by Foreign Affairs as “a brilliant tableau of today’s Iran,” by the Washington Post as “invaluable, now more than ever,” by the Columbia Journalism Review as “the best of the recent crop of Iran books,” and by CNN’s Fareed Zakaria as “one of the two best books on Iran you will ever read.” He is currently at work on a study of the “The New Silk Road” – the growing geo-commercial and economic corridor between the Middle East and Asia.
A graduate of the Johns Hopkins University Paul H Nitze School of Advanced International Studies in Middle East history and international economics (MA, ‘97), Molavi was named by the World Economic Forum in Davos in 2005 as a Young Global Leader, a collection of leading thinkers, political figures, scientists, academics, and civil society actors under the age of forty.

Molavi has also worked at the International Finance Corporation, the private sector development arm of the World Bank Group, where he headed the civil society/media outreach for the Middle East/North Africa and the Southern Europe/Central Asia regions. He lives in Washington DC with his wife, Sheila, and son, Dariush.