CHAUTAUQUA INSTITUTION

@ Chautauqua July 14, 2010 / Hall of Philosophy / 2 p.m.

Haleh Esfandiari, the Director of the Middle East Program at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, has had a rich and varied career. In her native Iran, she was a journalist, served as deputy secretary general of the Women's Organization of Iran, and was the deputy director of a cultural foundation for which she was responsible for the activities of several museums and art and cultural centers. She taught Persian language at Oxford University and, prior to coming to the Wilson Center, from 1980 to 1994, she taught Persian language and contemporary Persian literature and courses on the women's movement in Iran at Princeton University.

Haleh Esfandiari is the author of My Prison, My Home: One Woman’s Story of Captivity in Iran (September 2009), Reconstructed Lives: Women and Iran's Islamic Revolution (1997), editor of Iranian Women: Past, Present and Future (1977), co-author of Best Practices: Progressive Family Laws in Muslim Countries, the co-editor of The Economic Dimensions of Middle Eastern History (1990) and also of the of the multi-volume memoirs of the famed Iranian scholar, Ghassem Ghani.

Her articles have appeared in essay collections in a number of books as well as in Foreign Policy, Journal of Democracy, Princeton Papers in Near Eastern Studies, New Republic, Wilson Quarterly, Chronicle of Higher Education and Middle East Review. Her Washington Post Op-Ed pieces include “Held in My Homeland” (September 2007) and “Tehran's Self-Fulfilling Paranoia” (August 2009). She has also written for blogs such as the New York Review of Books Blog with “Iran’s Harshest Sentence for an Innocent Scholar” (October 2009) and “Iran’s Women of War” (January 2010), as well as “Why Iran Freed Roxana Saberi” (May 2009) in the Daily Beast.

Haleh Esfandiari is the first recipient of a yearly award established in her name, the Haleh Esfandiari Award; this award was presented to her by a group of businesswomen and activists from countries across the Middle East and North Africa region on the occasion of a conference sponsored by the Wilson Center – Women Entrepreneurs: Business and Legal Reform in the MENA Region – held in Amman, Jordan on May 20-22, 2008. She is also the recipient of the Special American Red Cross Award (2008), an honorary degree from Georgetown University Law Center (2008), the Women's Equality Award from the National Council of Women's Organizations (2008), Miss Hall’s School Woman of Distinction Award (April 2009), a recipient of a MacArthur Foundation grant and was a fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars from 1995 to 1996. Dr. Esfandiari is a member of the Board of Advisors of the Project on Middle East Democracy and, in December 2008, became one of three first annual recipients of POMED’s “Leader for Democracy” award. She was featured in Parade magazine (May 2008), in O, the Oprah Winfrey magazine (November 2008), and in Vogue magazine (August 2009). Her memoir, My Prison, My Home, based on Esfandiari’s arrest by the Iranian security authorities in 2007, after which she spent 105 days in solitary confinement in Tehran’s Evin Prison, was published in September 2009.