Azar Nafisi

Azar Nafisi is currently the director of Cultural Conversations at the Foreign Policy Institute of Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies in Washington, DC, where she is a professor of aesthetics, culture and literature, and teaches courses on the relation between culture and politics. 

She is best known as the author of the national bestseller Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books, a compassionate and harrowing portrait of the Islamic revolution in Iran.

Nafisi's latest work, The Republic of Imagination: America in Three Books, picks up the thread of her earlier work and extends an emphatic argument for literature’s crucial place in democratic societies.