Azar Nafisi, a best-selling writer and internatioin activist on behalf of women’s rights and democracy, speaks and writes from her life experience as a college professor in Iran during and after the 1979 Islamic revolution. Her most recent work, Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books (2003) combines autobiography and criticism to offer what one reviewer called, “an eloquent brief on the transformative power of fiction” and art. Nafisi is currently professor of literature at the Johns Hopkins University, specializing in the study of Iran, Middle East culture, and human rights, and the director of the Dialogue Project at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. She was formerly a professor at Tehran and Allemeh Tabataba’i Universities in Iran. Her first book was Anti-Terra: A Critical Study of Vladimir Nabokov’s novel.
