The United States, Iran and Israel:
The View from History

"The United States, Iran and Israel: The View from History"

with Dr. John Ghazvinian

To the uninitiated observer, it might not be obvious why Iran and Israel should have such a vigorous animosity towards each other. After all, Iran is not an Arab state, it is many hundreds of miles from Israel, and until recently, neither country had ever militarily attacked the other. And yet, since the early 1990s, the antipathy between Iran and Israel has overshadowed virtually every aspect of Middle East regional politics -- and has often deeply influenced U.S. policy in the region as well. This lecture will consider the complex three-way interaction between these nations from a historical perspective, and will attempt to shed light on how we have ended up in the difficult situation that confronts us today.

Speaker Bio

Dr. John Ghazvinian is an author, historian and former journalist, specializing in the history of US-Iran relations. His most recent book, America and Iran: A History from 1720 to the Present (Knopf, 2021) -- a comprehensive survey of the bilateral relationship, based on years of archival research in both countries -- was named by the New York Times as one of "100 Notable Books of 2021." He is also author of Untapped: The Scramble for Africa's Oil (Harcourt, 2007), as well as coeditor of American and Muslim Worlds before 1900 (Bloomsbury, 2020). He has written for such publications as Newsweek, the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, The Nation, the Sunday Times and the Huffington Post, and has taught modern Middle East history at a number of colleges and universities in the Philadelphia area. He earned his doctorate in history at Oxford University, and was the recipient of a "Public Scholar" fellowship from the National
Endowment for the Humanities in 2016-2017, as well as a fellowship from the Carnegie Corporation's special initiative on Islam in 2009-2010. John is passionate about public scholarship, making expertise accessible, and helping academics become more comfortable writing for general audiences. He is founding director of Scholars to Storytellers -- an initiative aimed at coaching senior scholars to reach wider readerships for their work.