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TRITA PARSI

FOREIGN POLICY SCHOLAR, AUTHOR AND EXPERT ON IRAN, TO SPEAK

NYS Writers Institute, November 19, 2012
8:00 p.m. Discussion | Campus Center Room 375, Uptown Campus

CALENDAR LISTING:
Trita Parsi, scholar, author and advocate of diplomatic approaches to conflicts in the Middle East, will deliver a talk entitled “U.S. and Iran: Between War and Diplomacy” on Monday, November 19 at 8:00 p.m. in Campus Center Room 375 on the University at Albany’s uptown campus. Free and open to the public, the event is cosponsored by the New York State Writers Institute, Women Against War, Fellowship of Reconciliation, and the UUP Peace and Justice Committee.

PROFILE
Trita Parsi, scholar, author and advocate of diplomatic approaches to conflicts in the Middle East, will deliver a talk entitled “U.S. and Iran: Between War and Diplomacy.” He is a frequent guest on the PBS Newshour, BBC, and CNN. His opinion pieces have appeared in the New York Times, Time, Salon, the Daily Beast, and other major publications.

Parsi’s most recent book is Single Roll of the Dice—Obama’s Diplomacy with Iran (2012), which addresses the potential successes and failures of the current president’s approach to preventing a nuclear Iran. In researching the book, Parsi interviewed more than 70 diplomats and other key officials from the United States, Iran, Israel, Europe, and the Middle East.

Publishers Weekly, in a starred review, called it, “A must-read for all those interested in the relationship between Washington and Tehran.” The reviewer for the New Yorker said that Parsi, “explores an important issue in depth and with clarity, providing a useful view of current concerns about a nuclear Iran.”  Jon Stewart of The Daily Show said, “You gotta get this…. it’s an amazing perspective on all the elements that go into even the smallest of diplomatic deals.” The Obama administration’s former U.S. Deputy Assistant Secretary of State John Limbert said, “Trita Parsi’s gripping account is a must-read for anyone fascinated by the human details of recent diplomacy. Parsi recounts it all—the misunderstandings, the fears, the prejudices, the ambitions, and the misreading—that have hobbled American efforts to end three decades of futility with Iran.”

Parsi is also the author of Treacherous Alliance: The Secret Dealings of Iran, Israel and the United States (2007). Based on more than 130 interviews with senior Israeli, Iranian, and American decision-makers, the book received the 2008 Arthur Ross Book Award silver medal of the Council on Foreign Relations, and the $200,000 Grawemeyer Award of the University of Louisville. Writing in the New York Review of Books, Peter Galbraith called it, “[A] wonderfully informative account of the triangular relationship among the US, Iran, and Israel.”Former Israeli Foreign Minister Shlomo Ben-Ami called it, “A brilliant interpretation of one of today’s most enigmatic conflicts.”

Founder and president of the National Iranian American Council, Parsi was born in Iran to a Zoroastrian family. His father, a politically active university professor, was jailed twice, first by the Shah and later by the regime of Ayatollah Khomeini. At the age of four, Parsi fled with his family to Sweden where he grew up. He came to the U.S. as an adult, and received his Ph.D. from the School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University.

For additional information, contact the Writers Institute at 518-442-5620 or online at https://www.albany.edu/writers-inst.