Boroujerdi on the Arab Spring

The promise and perils of the Arab Spring for the U.S. was the subject of a public lecture by Mehrzad Boroujerdi, an expert on Iranian politics and culture, at Wheaton College this November.

The lecture was organized in memory of Professor of Political Science Jerry Murphy as part of the college’s Modern Islamic World Program.  It was organized by the Professor Alireza Shomali, and students Ryan Eddy, Gabrielle Ferreira, Olivia Ahmadi, Paul (Thomas) Bruemmer, Rasheeda Abdul-Musawwir, and Elana Jabbour

The speaker, Mehrzad Boroujerdi, serves as the founding director of the Middle Eastern Studies Program and the founding co-director of the Religion, Media and International Relations Program at Syracuse’s Maxwell School. He is also the President-elect of the International Society for Iranian Studies.

As a scholar and author, Boroujerdi has written more than 30 journal articles and book chapters in English and Persian, he is the author of I Carved, Worshiped and Shattered: Essays on Iranian Politics and Identity (2010) and Iranian Intellectuals and the West: The Tormented Triumph of Nativism (1996) — translated into Arabic, Persian, and Turkish — and is the editor of a forthcoming volume entitled Mirror for the Muslim Prince: Islam and Theory of Statecraft.

Boroujerdi is a non-resident scholar at the Middle East Institute (Washington, D.C.), a member of the Social Science Research Council’s Religion and International Affairs Advisory Committee, an institutional trustee of the American Institute of Iranian Studies, and a member of the Board of Directors of the Near East Foundation. He has been the recipient of grants from the Henry R. Luce Foundation, the Social Science Research Council, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Institute of International Education, the U.S. Department of Education, and the United States Institute of Peace.

For the last several years, Boroujerdi has been working on a large research project collecting data on more than 2,000 members of the political elite of post-revolutionary Iran. Since 1996, he has served as the editor of more than 28 books published by Syracuse University Press under the imprint of Modern Intellectual and Political History of the Middle East. From 2000 to 2007 he served as the book review editor of the International Journal of Middle East Studies.