Expertise
The Middle East; U.S. foreign policy; sectarian violence
Experience
Vali Nasr is the Dean of the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. He is also a Middle East scholar, foreign policy adviser and commentator on international relations whose most recent book, The Dispensable Nation, deals with the implications of the Obama administration’s foreign policy on American strategic interests. His earlier books, Forces of Fortune and The Shia Revival, examined the postwar sectarian violence in Iraq and the uprisings known as the Arab Spring and contributed to US policy formulated in response to those events; prior to being named Johns Hopkins SAIS dean, was a professor of international politics at Tufts University’s Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy; from 2009 to 2011, was special adviser to the president’s special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan; served on the faculties of the Naval Postgraduate School, Stanford University, the University of California, San Diego and the University of San Diego; was a Carnegie Scholar and a senior fellow at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government, an adjunct senior fellow for Middle Eastern studies at the Council on Foreign Relations and a senior fellow in foreign policy at the Brookings Institution; a member of the US Department of State’s Foreign Affairs Policy Board, and is a life member of the Council on Foreign Relations.
Education
Vali Nasr holds a Ph.D. in political science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.