Abbas Milani was born in Iran, sent to California at 16, earned BA and PhD degrees in political science. He returned to Iran where he taught law and political science at Tehran University. After giving a lecture on Marxism, he was imprisoned and not allowed to publish or teach after the revolution of 1979.
In 1986 he moved to the United States where he taught at Notre Dame de Namur University and was a visiting Research Fellow at the UC Berkeley’s Middle East Center. Professor Milani came to Stanford in 2003 where he founded and is director of the Iranian Studies Program. He is one of the founding co-directors of the Iran Democracy Project and a research fellow at the Hoover Institution. He has published more than twenty books and two hundred articles and book reviews in scholarly magazines, journals, and newspapers.