Mehrzad Boroujerdi

Middle East scholar Mehrzad Boroujerdi will explore the growing tensions within the Middle East and the impact that U.S. President Donald Trump’s administration has on the region, during a special lecture on Tuesday, Nov. 21, at California State University, Northridge.

The lecture, “United States and an Imploding Middle East: Where to from Here?” will take place from 2 to 3:15 p.m. in the Grand Salon of the University Student Union, located at the east side of the camps at 18111 Nordhoff St. in Northridge.

“I have not seen the Middle East in as bad a shape as it is in right now,” said Boroujerdi, a political science professor and O’Hanley Faculty Scholar at Syracuse University in New York. “I plan to explore some of the major crises in the region, from Syria, Iraq and Yemen to Iran and the tensions between Qatar and Saudi Arabia. When you add the policies of the Trump administration, or lack thereof, there are some questions about what we have to look forward to in 2018 and beyond.”

Boroujerdi currently is a Fellow of the American Council on Education in residence at CSUN. He is also a visiting scholar at UCLA’s Center for Near Eastern Studies. His research centers around the intellectual and political history of modern Iran. He is the author of “Iranian Intellectuals and the West: The Tormented Triumph of Nativism,” “I Carved, Worshipped and Shattered: Essays on Iranian Politics and Identity” (in Persian) and “Post-Revolutionary Iran: A Handbook.” He also has authored numerous journal articles and book chapters in English and Persian, and edited “Mirror for the Muslim Prince: Islam and Theory of Statecraft.”

“This is a fantastic opportunity to hear from Mehrzad Boroujerdi,” said gender and women’s studies professor Nayereh Tohidi, director of CSUN’s Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies program. “He is one of the most well-respected, far-sighted, non-partisan scholars on the situation in the Middle East. There is so much we can learn from him.”

Boroujerdi has been a postdoctoral fellow and a Rockefeller Foundation Fellow at Harvard University and the University of Texas at Austin. In addition, he has served as the editor of the “Modern Intellectual and Political History of the Middle East” book series; book review editor of the International Journal of Middle East Studies; and a principal investigator of the Iran Data Portal, an English- and Persian-language online portal that features social science data on Iran — including socioeconomic data, electoral data, information on political parties, and translations of selected laws and regulations; as well as a non-resident scholar at the Middle East Institute in Washington, D.C.

His lecture is being presented by CSUN’s Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies program and co-sponsored by CSUN’s Department of Political Science and Institute of Gender, Globalization and Democracy.

For more information about the lecture, call (818) 677-7218.

Mehrzad Boroujerdi, Middle East