Azar Nafisi

Azar Nafisi is an Iranian literary scholar and author. She taught English literature at several universities in Iran, including the University of Tehran, the Islamic Azad University and Allameh Tabatabai University. After refusing to wear the veil, she was banned from teaching at the University of Tehran. She left Iran and emigrated to the United States in 1997. There, she was a fellow at the Foreign Policy Institute of Johns Hopkins University and taught as a visiting lecturer at Oxford. Her book “Reading Lolita in Tehran” brought her international recognition.