Vali Nasr
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Vali Nasr is a leading academic and influential expert on the Muslim world issues, and best-selling author and commentator on Middle East affairs and Islamic politics.
Born in 1960 in Iran, Nasr and his family immigrated to the United States following the 1979 Islamic Revolution. Vali is son of Hossein Nasr, an Iranian University Professor of Islamic study at George Washington University, and a prominent Islamic philosopher.
Vali received his BA in international relations from Tufts University. He earned his master’s 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 for Technology in 1991.
An expert in contemporary Middle Eastern affairs and Islam and politics, in January, 2006, Nasr was named the Adjunct Senior Fellow for Middle Eastern Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations, a nonpartisan think-tank focusing on foreign policy. He was also a Senior Fellow with The Dubai Initiative, Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University between 2007 and 2009. He was named Carnegie Scholar in 2006.
Known for his view that wars within Islam will shape the future, Nasr has advised senior policy makers including the president, and also testified before the US Senate and advised members of both houses of the US Congress on Middle East issues. In 2007-08 he served as an adviser to Democratic presidential candidates. In 2009 he joined the Obama administration as Senior Advisor on Afghanistan and Pakistan. Since 2008 he has been Professor of International Politics at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy of Tufts University.
He is currently a Professor of International Politics at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy of Tufts University, Senior Fellow at the Belfer Center at Harvard, Senior Fellow in Foreign Policy at Brookings Institution, and a columnist with Bloomberg View. He is a Member of the State Department's Foreign Affairs Policy Board, and a member of Board of Trustees of Rockefeller Brother Fund and the National Democratic Institute.
Publications
Nasr is coauthor of Democracy in Iran: History and the Quest for Liberty (Oxford University Press), and is the author of four additional books: Forces of Fortune: The Rise of the New Muslim Middle Class and What It will Mean for Our World, The Shia Revival: How Conflicts within Islam Will Shape the Future(W.W. Norton, 2005); 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). Nasr 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 work has been translated into Arabic, Chinese, French, Indonesian, Persian, Spanish, Turkish, and Urdu.
