Dr. Mehrzad Boroujerdi is Associate Professor of Political Science at Syracuse University’s Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs where he also serves as the Founding Director of the Middle Eastern Studies Program and Co-Director of the Religion, Media and International Relations Program. Professor Boroujerdi received his BA in Political Science and Sociology from Boston University, and his Ph.D. in International Relations from the American University in Washington, D.C. His doctoral dissertation won the Foundation for Iranian Studies’ 1990 award for best Dissertation in the Field of Iranian Studies. From 1990 to 1992 he was respectively a post-doctoral fellow at Harvard University's Center for Middle Eastern Studies and a Rockefeller Foundation fellow at the University of Texas at Austin.

Boroujerdi’s Middle East studies focus is on Iran and political Islam. His current research is on political elite in post-revolutionary Iran and also on the intellectual history of the contemporary Middle East. In addition to numerous journal articles and book chapters in English and Persian, he is the author of Iranian Intellectuals and the West: The Tormented Triumph of Nativism, which has been translated into Arabic, Persian, and Turkish. His research work has been supported by the Henry R. Luce Foundation, the Social Science Research Council, the Rockefeller Foundation and the United States Institute of Peace. He is the general editor of the Modern Intellectual and Political History of the Middle East series published by Syracuse University Press and from 2000-2007 and served as the book review editor of the International Journal of Middle East Studies. He is also an Adjunct Scholar at the Middle East Institute in Washington, DC as well as a member of the Social Science Research Council’s Religion and International Affairs Advisory Committee.

As a Middle East expert, Boroujerdi has consulted with a number of organizations both domestic and international. He is interviewed quite frequently by national and international news media (such as Associated Press, BBC, National Public Radio, New York Times, Reuters, Washington Post) as one of the leading Iran experts around the world.

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