Vali R. Nasr
Dean, Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies
Office of the Dean
Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies
The Johns Hopkins University
1740 Massachusetts Ave. N.W.
Washington, D.C. 20036
Phone: (202) 663-5624
E-mail:
vnasr@jhu.edu
Vali R. Nasr, a leading scholar, foreign policy adviser to Democratic and Republican administrations, and commentator on international relations, became the eighth dean of The Johns Hopkins University's Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies on July 1, 2012.
He is a senior fellow of the Brookings Institution and a member of the U.S. State Department's Foreign Policy Advisory Board. For two years, from 2009 to 2011, he also served as special adviser to Richard Holbrooke, the late ambassador who was then the president's special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan.
Nasr leads a school founded in Washington, D.C., in 1943 to prepare students to assume major responsibility in the postwar world. SAIS, as the school is known informally, became a part of Johns Hopkins in 1950 and now has additional campuses in Bologna, Italy, and Nanjing, China. Its nearly 1,000 students across the three locations benefit from the school's emphasis on diverse knowledge and skill sets in core disciplines, such as strategic studies and international development; international economics; regional study; and foreign language training.
Nasr is a leading scholar on the politics of the Middle East and the Muslim world and on foreign policy. Two of his books, The Shia Revival and Forces of Fortune, foresaw, respectively, post-war sectarian violence in Iraq and the uprisings that became known as the Arab Spring. The books contributed to U.S. policy formulated in response to those events.
Nasr has advised or presented briefings to presidents and vice presidents, senior cabinet secretaries of both parties, congressional committees, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs and other military leaders, and presidential campaigns.
He is a columnist for Bloomberg View and has contributed to the New York Times, Washington Post, Foreign Policy, Foreign Affairs and other publications. He has been widely interviewed on Middle East issues and has appeared on CNN, NBC, NPR and PBS. He has been a guest on The Daily Show and The Colbert Report. His Twitter feed on foreign affairs issues is at http://twitter.com//vali_nasr.
From 2007 until he joined Johns Hopkins, Nasr was professor of international politics at Tufts University's Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy. He was associate director of the school's Fares Center for Eastern Mediterranean Studies and worked closely with Tufts' president and provost on university-wide initiatives and on the university's global presence.
Nasr has served as a fellow at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, and on the faculties of the Naval Postgraduate School; Stanford University; the University of California, San Diego; and the University of San Diego. The Tehran-born immigrant is a 2011 recipient of the Ellis Island Medal of Honor. He has also been a Carnegie Scholar and is a life member of the Council on Foreign Relations.
He is a 1983 summa cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Tufts and received a Master of Arts in Law and Diplomacy from the Fletcher School the following year. He earned a Ph.D. in political science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1991.
