Vali Nasr

Vali Nasr is the Majid Khadduri professor of international affairs and Middle East studies at the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies. He served as the eighth dean of SAIS between 2012 and 2019 and served as senior advisor to U.S. special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan, Ambassador Richard Holbrooke, between 2009 and 2011. Nasr is the author of The Dispensable Nation: American Foreign Policy in Retreat; Forces of Fortune: The Rise of the New Muslim Middle Class and What It Will Mean for Our World; The Shia Revival: How Conflicts Within Islam Will Shape the Future; Democracy in Iran: History and the Quest for Liberty; The Islamic Leviathan: Islam and the Making of State Power; Mawdudi and the Making of Islamic Revivalism; The Vanguard of Islamic Revolution: Jama’at-i Islami of Pakistan; and numerous articles in scholarly journals. Most recently, he co-authored How Sanctions Work: Iran and the Impact of Economic Warfare and Iran’s Grand Strategy: A Political History.

He has advised senior U.S. policymakers, world leaders, and businesses, including the president, secretary of state, senior members of Congress, and presidential campaigns. He has written for The New York Times, Foreign Affairs, Financial Times, The Wall Street Journal, and The Washington Post, among others. Nasr serves as the co-director of the SAIS Rethinking Iran Initiative at Johns Hopkins University, the leading hub for fostering a comprehensive and nuanced understanding of contemporary Iran and its regional influence within academia and the public sphere. He is a member of the International Advisory Board of the Blavatnik School of Government at Oxford University, the International Advisory Council at the American University of Beirut, and the Global Board of Trustees of Asia Society. He is also on the board of governors of the Rajaratnam School of International Studies in Singapore. He has been the recipient of grants from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation, and Social Science Research Council, and he was named a 2006 Carnegie scholar and holds the 2024-25 Henry A. Kissinger Chair in Foreign Policy and International Relations at The John W. Kluge Center at the Library of Congress.

Nasr received his BA from Tufts University in international relations summa cum laude and was initiated into Phi Beta Kappa in 1983. He earned his master’s from the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy in international economics and Middle East studies in 1984 and his PhD from MIT in political science in 1991.