New York University

Ali Mirsepassi is Professor of Middle Eastern Studies and Sociology. From 2002 to 2007, he held several administrative posts in the Gallatin School Deans' Office, most notably serving as the School's Interim Dean for two years. He is currently a Carnegie Scholar (2007-2009) whose research project examines Western influence on political Islam. Before joining the faculty at Gallatin, Professor Mirsepassi taught at Hampshire College, Amherst College, Mount Holyoke College, Smith College, and the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. His teaching interests include social theories of modernity, comparative and historical sociology, sociology of religion, Middle Eastern societies and cultures, and Islam and social change. He has published in such journals as Contemporary Sociology, Radical History, Social Text, and Nepantla. He is the author of Islam and Democracy (forthcoming), Intellectual Discourses and Politics of Modernization: Negotiating Modernity in Iran (Cambridge University Press, 2000), and Truth or Democracy (published in Iran and being translated into English); coeditor of Localizing Knowledge in a Globalizing World (Syracuse University Press, 2002); and guest editor of "Beyond the Boundaries of the Old Geographies: Natives, Citizens, Exiles, and Cosmopolitans" in Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East (CSSAAME), spring 2005. He is currently completing a book entitled Social Hope and Philosophical Despair. Professor Mirsepassi has received several awards and grants, including the Iranian "Best Researcher of the Year" (2001), a teaching award from Tehran University, and grants from the Ford Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities.