About Abbas Milani

He was born in Iran to a prosperous family, sent to California when he was 16, graduating from Oakland Technical High School in 1966 after only one year of studies. Milani earned B.A. in political science and economics, from the University of California, Berkeley in 1970 and his Ph.D. in political science from the University of Hawaii in 1974.

He then returned to Iran to serve as an assistant professor of political science at the National University of Iran from 1975 to 1977. He lectured on Marxist themes veiled in metaphor but was jailed for one year as a political prisoner for "activities against the {{Shah}} government". He was a research fellow at the Iranian Center for Social Research, assistant professor of law and political science at the University of Tehran, and a member of the board of directors of Tehran University's Center for International Studies before and after Iranian Revolution; but soon after he left Iran to California in 1986 since he was not allowed to publish or teach.
In US, Milani was appointed professor of History and Political Science as well as chair of the department at Notre Dame de Namur University in Belmont, south of San Francisco. He served as a research fellow at the Institute of International Studies at UC Berkeley also became a Hoover Institution research fellow in 2001.

Currently he is a visiting professor of Political Science and the director of the Iranian Studies program at Stanford University. He is also a research fellow and co-director of the Iran Democracy Project at Stanford University's Hoover Institution.