Biography

John Ghazvinian is an author, historian and former journalist, specializing in the history of US-Iran relations. His latest book, America and Iran: A History, 1720 to the Present (Knopf, 2021) — a comprehensive survey of the bilateral relationship, based on years of archival research in both countries — was named by the New York Times as one of “100 Notable Books of 2021”. He is also author of Untapped: The Scramble for Africa's Oil (Harcourt, 2007), as well as coeditor of American and Muslim Worlds before 1900 (Bloomsbury, 2020). He has written for such publications as Newsweek, the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, The Nation, the Sunday Times and the Huffington Post, and has taught modern Middle East history at a number of colleges and universities in the Philadelphia area. He earned his doctorate in history at Oxford University, and was the recipient of a "Public Scholar" fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities in 2016-2017, as well as a fellowship from the Carnegie Corporation's special initiative on Islam in 2009-2010.

Ghazvinian is Executive Director of the Middle East Center at the University of Pennsylvania.

He is also passionate about public scholarship, making expertise accessible and helping academics become more comfortable writing for general audiences. He is the founding director of Scholars to Storytellers — an initiative aimed at coaching senior scholars to reach wider readerships for their work.

AMERICA AND IRAN: A HISTORY, 1720 TO THE PRESENT

AVAILABLE January 26, 2021

“History in the hands of a master. Ghazvinian leads us far beyond the mindless shouting of recent decades to tell a story of friendship, sacrifice and discovery. Should be required reading in both Tehran and Washington.”

— Ambassador John Limbert, US Deputy Secretary of State for Iran (2009-2010); former hostage in the US Embassy in Tehran (1979-1981)

“An important, urgently needed book — a hugely ambitious, illuminating portrait of the two-centuries-long entwined histories of Iran and America, and the first book to examine, in all its aspects, the rich and fraught relations between these two powers — once allies, now adversaries.

”In this rich, fascinating history, John Ghazvinian traces the complex story of the relations of these two powers back to the Persian Empire of the eighteenth century — the subject of great admiration of Thomas Jefferson and John Quincy Adams — and an America seen by Iranians as an ideal to emulate for their own government.

”Drawing on years of archival research both in the United States and Iran — including access to Iranian government archives rarely available to Western scholars, Ghazvinian leads us through the four seasons of US-Iran relations: the ‘spring’ of mutual fascination; the ‘summer’ of early interactions; the ‘autumn’ of close strategic ties; and the long, dark ‘winter’ of mutual hatred.

”Ghazvinian, with grasp and a storyteller’s ability, makes clear where, how and when it all went wrong. And shows why two countries that once had such heartfelt admiration for each other became such committed enemies; showing us, as well, how it didn’t have to turn out this way.”

—PenguinRandomHouse