Watson Events

Nazila Fathi ─ Iran’s Islamic Revolution 35 Years Later

Wednesday, November 19, 2014

12 p.m.

Joukowsky Forum

Registration required. Register here.

The seminar will be followed by a signing of Nazila Fathi’s forthcoming book The Lonely War: One Woman’s Account for the Struggle for Modern Iran.

Watch webcast

Iran has gone under profound change since its 1979 revolution. Even though the founders of the new regime had vowed to establish an Islamic state, the regime shed its ideological skin over the years and there is only a skeleton left of those earlier fundamentalist ideas. On the contrary, the regime’s policies have empowered traditional women, raised education levels and increased the population’s longing for civil liberties.

More Information

Center for Middle East Studies

Nazila Fathi is a journalist, translator and commentator on Iran and the author of The Lonely War: One Woman’s Account of the Struggle for Modern Iran (will be available on December 9, 2014). She reported out of Iran for nearly two decades until 2009 when she was forced to leave the country because of government threats against her. She was based in Tehran from 2001 for The New York Times, during a time when she penned over 2,000 articles for the Times. Prior to that, she wrote for Time Magazine, Agence France Press and the Times. She translated a book, History and Documentation of Human Rights in Iran, by the Noble Peace Prize Laureate, Shirin Ebadi, into English in 2001. She has written for the New York Review of Books, Foreign Policy and Harvard Nieman Report and has been a guest speaker on CNN, BBC, CBC and NPR. She received her Masters of Arts from University of Toronto in Political Science. She was awarded Raoul Wallenberg Fellowship at Lund University in 2003, Nieman Fellowship for journalism at Harvard in 2010-11, Shorenstein Fellowship at the Harvard Kennedy School in 2012 and a fellowship at Harvard Belfer Center in 2012-13.