Azar Nafisi

Author

Azar Nafisi a Visiting Professor and Executive Director of Cultural Conversations at John Hopkins University’s Foreign Policy Institute. She previously held a fellowship at the University of Oxford, where she lectured on the importance of Western literature and Culture in post-revolution Iran. She has also taught at the Free Islamic University, Allameh Tabatabai, and University of Tehran, where she was expelled for refusing to wear an Islamic veil. She has written for the New York Times, the Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal, among others.

Nafisi is the author of a number of books, including Anti-Terra: A Critical Study of Vladimir Nabokov’s Novels (1994), but is perhaps best known for her 2003 novel Reading Lolita in Tehran. Her book Things I Have Been Silent About: Memories, a memoir about her mother, was published in 2008.