Ali Banuazizi is a professor of political science at Boston College and director of the
Islamic Civilization and Societies Program. After receiving his Ph.D. from Yale University in
1968, he taught at Yale and the University of Southern California before joining the Boston
College Faculty in 1971. Since then, he has held visiting appointments at Princeton, Harvard,
the University of Tehran, Oxford University, and M.I.T.

Ali Banuazizi served as editor of Iranian Studies from 1968 to 1982. He is a past president of the Middle East Studies Association of North America (MESA) and the International Society for Iranian Studies (ISIS). He served on the task force on U.S. public diplomacy at the Council of Foreign Relation in 2002-03.

He is the author of numerous articles on society, culture, and politics in Iran and the
Middle East, and the coeditor (with Myron Weiner) of three books on politics, religion and
society in Southwest and Central Asia, including The State, Religion, and Ethnic Politics in
Afghanistan, Iran, and Pakistan (1986), The Politics of Social Transformation in Afghanistan,
Iran, and Pakistan (1994), and The New Geopolitics of Central Asia and Its Borderlands (1994). His forthcoming book is tentatively titled Martyrdom: From Sacred to Profane.