Welcoming 2024 Zahedi Fellow Dr. Hussein Banai

Hussein Banai is an Associate Professor of International Studies in the Hamilton Lugar School of Global and International Studies at Indiana University, Bloomington, where he is also faculty affiliate in the departments of Political Science, Middle Eastern Languages and Cultures, and Central Eurasian Studies. He is also a Research Affiliate at the Center for International Studies at MIT. Banai's research interests lie at the intersection of political thought and international relations, with a special focus on topics in democratic theory, non-Western liberal thought, diplomatic history and theory, US-Iran relations, and Iran’s political development. He has published on these topics in academic, policy, and popular periodicals.

He is the author of Hidden Liberalism: Burdened Visions of Progress in Modern Iran (Cambridge University Press, 2020); co-author of two volumes on US-Iran relations: Republics of Myth: National Narratives and the US-Iran Conflict (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2022) and Becoming Enemies: U.S.-Iran Relations and the Iran-Iraq War, 1979–1988 (Rowman & Littlefield, 2012); and co-editor of Human Rights at the Intersections: Transformation through Local, Global, and Cosmopolitan Challenges (Bloomsbury Publishing, 2023). Additionally, he is the Co-Editor of International Studies Review, the flagship review journal of the International Studies Association. From 2018 to 2020, he served as an Associate Editor (for Social Sciences) of Iranian Studies, the journal of the Association for Iranian Studies.

During his fellowship at Stanford in the fall of 2024, Banai will utilize the Zahedi archives to trace and ascertain the impact of foreign policy decisions on considerations of political legitimacy during the Pahlavi period. This work is part of a larger research on the shifting sources of political legitimacy informing decision-making and agenda-setting in Pahlavi Iran.

The Zahedi Family Fellowship is a 12-week residential fellowship with the Hamid and Christina Moghadam Program in Iranian Studies and the Hoover Library and Archives at Stanford focused on the Ardeshir Zahedi Archives. Banai will give a public lecture on his research at the end of his residency (details to come in the fall quarter).