Vali R. Nasr is a professor of international politics at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy of Tufts University and an adjunct senior fellow for Middle Eastern studies at the Council on Foreign Relations. He is a specialist on Middle Eastern politics and political Islam, and has worked extensively on political and social developments in the Muslim world with a focus on the relation of religion to politics, social change, and democratization. He also serves as a senior fellow for the Dubai Initiative at Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government.
Dr. Nasr is the author of five books: The Shia Revival: How Conflicts within Islam Will Shape the Future (W.W. Norton, 2006); Democracy in Iran (Oxford University Press, 2006); The Islamic Leviathan: Islam and the Making of State Power (Oxford University Press, 2001); Mawdudi and the Making of Islamic Revivalism (Oxford University Press, 1996); and The Vanguard of the Islamic Revolution: The Jama`at-i Islami of Pakistan (University of California Press, 1994). He is editor of The Oxford Dictionary of Islam (Oxford University Press, 2003); coeditor of Expectation of the Millennium: Shi`ism in History (SUNY Press, 1989); and the author of numerous articles in academic journals and encyclopedias. His works have been translated into Arabic, French, Spanish, Indonesian, Turkish, Persian, Chinese, and Urdu.
Dr. Nasr has written for the New York Times, Washington Post, Time, Los Angeles Times, Christian Science Monitor, The New Republic, La Repubblica, Süddeutsche Zeitung, and was profiled on the front page of the Wall Street Journal. His interviews and expert commentary have also been used in newspapers and news programs around the world, including Al-Jazeera, Der Spiegel, CNN, BBC, Charlie Rose, Meet the Press, Fareed Zakaria's GPS on CNN, Jon Stewart's Daily Show and the Colbert Report and 60 Minutes.
He was recently named a 2006 Carnegie Scholar by the Carnegie Corporation. He has also been the recipient of grants from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation, the Social Science Research Council. He is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. He is also a Member of Board of Trustees of the Rockerfeller Brothers Fund.
Dr. Nasr received his BA from Tufts University in international relations summa cum laude and was initiated into Phi Beta Kappa in 1983. He earned his MA from the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy in international economics and Middle East studies in 1984 and his PhD in political science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1991.
