Born in 1951 in Ahvaz, Iran, Hamid Dabashi was educated in his hometown and Tehran before moving to the United States, where he received a dual Ph.D. in Sociology of Culture and Islamic Studies from the University of Pennsylvania, followed by a postdoctoral fellowship at Harvard University. He is currently the Hagop Kevorkian Professor of Iranian Studies and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. Dabashi has written 20 books, edited four, and contributed chapters to various others, in addition to authoring over 100 essays, articles and book reviews. An internationally renowned cultural critic and award-winning author, his writings have been translated into numerous languages, including French, Spanish, Russian and Portuguese. A committed teacher for nearly three decades, Dabashi is also a public speaker, a current affairs essayist, a staunch anti-war activist, and the founder of Dreams of a Nation, a Palestinian film project dedicated to preserving Palestinian cinema. He has four children - Kaveh, Pardis, Chelgis and Golchin - and lives in New York with his wife and colleague, the Iranian-Swedish feminist Golbarg Bashi. Hamid has been a columnist for the Egyptian al-Ahram Weekly for over a decade, and is now a regular columnist for Aljazeera, by far the most global outlet on Arab affairs; and he has had a regular column at CNN. His essays on these venues are regularly translated into Arabic, Persian, Turkish, Urdu, etc. Hamid has appeared extensively on CNN, BBC, Aljazeera, and a number of other news media in Latin America, Japan, Russia, India, the US and the EU, and has travelled and lectured extensively in the Arab world, from Morocco to Egypt to Palestine to Syria.
