Haleh Esfandiari
Haleh Esfandiari (Persian: هاله اسفندیاری) (born March 3, 1940) is an Iranian-American academic and former Director of the Middle East Program at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, D.C. Her areas of expertise include Middle Eastern women's issues, contemporary Iranian intellectual currents and politics, and democratic developments in the Middle East. She was detained in solitary confinement at Evin Prison in Tehran, Iran for more than 110 days from May 8 to August 21, 2007.[1]
Haleh Esfandiari
March 3, 1940
Iranian,
American
University of Vienna
College of Mass Communication in Tehran
Princeton University
Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars
Biography[edit]
Esfandiari was born and grew up in Iran. She has lived in the United States since 1980, having left Iran with her husband and daughter because of the 1979 Iranian Revolution.[2] She holds dual U.S.-Iranian citizenship.[3]
Esfandiari is married to Shaul Bakhash, a Jewish Iranian-American professor of history and Persian studies at George Mason University.[2] She met Bakhash in the early 1960s, when both were reporters at the Iranian newspaper Kayhan.[2] They have a daughter and two granddaughters.[4]
Career[edit]
Before Esfandiari left Iran, she had a career as a journalist and taught at the College of Mass Communication in Tehran. She was also Deputy Secretary General of the Women's Organization of Iran and she was responsible for several museums and art and cultural centers. She earned her Ph.D. at the University of Vienna.[5]
In the United States, Esfandiari taught courses on Persian language, contemporary Persian literature and the women's movement in Iran at Princeton University from 1980 to 1994. She was a fellow at the Wilson Center from 1995 to 1996.[5] She has served as director of the Middle East Program at the Wilson Center since 1997. She was also involved with the Wilson Center's collaboration with the RAND Corporation's Initiative for Middle Eastern Youth.[6]
Esfandiari was a fellow at the National Endowment for Democracy in its first year of fellowship program in 1995.[7] Esfandiari is a recipient of the MacArthur Foundation Grant.[5] She is known to have been close to Faiza (Faezeh) Hashemi Rafsanjani, an Iranian politician and a daughter of Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, a former President of Iran.[8] Since 2011, Esfandiari has been a member of the board of the Peace Research Endowment.[9]
Works[edit]
Esfandiari is the author of the book Reconstructed Lives: Women and Iran's Islamic Revolution (1997). In 2004, she co-wrote a paper for the Washington Institute for Near East Policy's Policy Watch Special Forum marking the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Islamic Revolution in Iran.[10] In April 2005, she contributed a piece for Foreign Policy, titled "Iranian Woman Please Stand Up".[11]
Esfandiari's book My Prison, My Home: One Woman's Story of Captivity in Iran[12] was published in September 2009.