Dr. Abbas Milani, director of Iranian Studies at Stanford University, will be coming to Boulder at the end of this week to give a talk on the US and the possibilities of democracy in Iran.
We are at a critical juncture in the troubled history of US-Iran relations and the prospects of democracy in Iran. After a brief schematic account of this history--from the arrival of missionaries to the advent of the Second World War, from 1951 to 1979, and from 1980 till today--Professor Milani will discuss the two questions of Iran's pursuit of democracy and America's uneven approach to this pursuit. The central focus of the talk will be how Iran today stands at the cusp of a cultural and political transformation--more societal than merely political--and only by grasping the essence of these changes can America formulate a policy that safeguards its own national interests while also respecting the pursuit of life, liberty and democracy for all in Iran.
An Iranian-American historian and author, Prof. Milani is presently the director of Iranian Studies at Stanford University; professor of International, Comparative, and Area Studies; a founding co-director of the Iran Democracy Project, and a research fellow at the Hoover Institution. He is also a prominent scholar of Iranian literature and culture. The most acclaimed recent book of his is Shah (Macmillan 2012), a biography of the last Shah of Iran in which Prof. Milani shows how Iran went from a politically moderate monarchy to a totalitarian Islamic republic.
Professor Milani has been invited to UC-Boulder by the Persian (Farsi) Program (Department of Asian Languages and Civilization), and this event has been sponsored by the Center for Asian Studies and the Department of Asian Languages and Civilizations.
This event will be on Friday, November 1, at 5:00 pm, in Humanities 150. For more information and to see a map of the event location, please click here.