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Haleh Esfandiari
Tuesday, July 22, 2008
Haleh Esfandiari is the Director
of the Middle East Program at the Woodrow Wilson International
Center for Scholars. Dr. Esfandiari taught Persian language and
contemporary Persian literature, as well as courses on the women's
movement in Iran, at Princeton University from 1980 to 1994.
Prior to Princeton, she served as deputy secretary general of
the Women's Organization of Iran, where she was also the deputy
director of a cultural foundation for which she was responsible
for the activities of several museums and art and cultural centers.
In Iran she also worked as a journalist and taught at the College
of Mass Communication in Tehran. She has also taught Persian
language at Oxford University.
Dr. Esfandiari is the author
of Reconstructed Lives: Women and Iran's Islamic Revolution;
editor of Iranian Women: Past, Present and Future; and co-editor
of The Economic Dimensions of Middle Eastern History and of the
multi-volume memoirs of the famed Iranian scholar, Ghassem Ghani.
Among her other writings are chapters in In the Eye of the Storm:
Women in Post-Revolutionary Iran; Iran at the Crossroads; Middle
Eastern Women on the Mov;, and Islam and Democracy in the Middle
East. Her articles have also appeared in Foreign Policy, Journal
of Democracy, Princeton Papers in Near Eastern Studies, the New
Republic, and Middle East Review. Her article "The Woman
Question" appeared in the Spring 2004 edition of the Wilson
Quarterly. She is the co-author of Best Practices: Progressive
Family Laws in Muslim Countries, a Woodrow Wilson Center and
RAND Corporation publication. She is the author of "Held
in My Homeland" in the Sept. 16, 2007, Outlook section of
The Washington Post, and co-author of "Why 'Soft' Power
in Iran Is Counterproductive," in the Oct. 8, 2007 issue
of The Chronicle of Higher Education.
Dr. Esfandiari has edited the
proceedings of conferences sponsored by the Middle East Program
that she directs, including: "Women in Central Asia: A Turn
of the Century Assessment" (2001), "Symposium on Palestinian
Refugees" (2001), "Intellectual Change and the New
Generation of Iranian Intellectuals" (2001), "An Assessment
of the Iranian Presidential Elections" (2002), "Women,
Muslim Laws, and Human Rights in Nigeria" (2003), "Post-Khatami
Iran" (2004), "The Status of Women in the Middle East"
(2005), "A Troubled Triangle: Afghanistan, Iran, and Pakistan"
(2005), "Building a New Iraq: Ensuring Women's Rights"
(2005), "Iran After the June 2005 Presidential Election"(2005),
"A View from the Region: Different Perspectives on Israel's
War with Lebanon's Hizbullah" (2006), and "Regional
Strategies for Empowering Women" (2006). Dr. Esfandiari
is the recipient of a MacArthur Foundation grant and was a fellow
at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars from
1995 to 1996. |
