Azar Nafisi

Iranian-American · born 1955

Born Azar Nafisi in 1955 in Tehran, the daughter of Ahmad Nafisi, the city's youngest ever mayor, and Nezhat Nafisi, one of the first women elected to the Iranian parliament, she watched her father imprisoned in 1963 not long after he left office. Sent to England at thirteen and later to school in Switzerland, she went on to study English and American literature in the United States, earning a Ph.D. from the University of Oklahoma in 1979. That same year, with the Shah's government collapsing and the Islamic Republic rising in its place, she returned to Tehran to teach at the university, introducing students to Fitzgerald, James, and Nabokov even as the country around them was remade. In 1981 the university expelled her for refusing to wear the mandatory veil, and she did not return to a classroom until 1987, teaching at the Free Islamic University and Allameh Tabataba'i University. In 1995, unwilling to keep making the compromises the state demanded of a woman teaching literature, she tried to resign from her post; the university refused to accept her resignation, and when she stopped coming to work, it expelled her instead. She then invited seven of her most committed former students to her apartment every Thursday morning, where for two years they read Lolita, Pride and Prejudice, Daisy Miller, and other books discouraged or banned by the Islamic Republic, removing their veils behind her closed door. In 1997 she left Iran for the United States with her husband, the civil engineer Bijan Naderi, and their two children, and joined Johns Hopkins University's School of Advanced International Studies. Reading Lolita in Tehran, published in 2003, turned those Thursday mornings into a memoir that spent 117 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list and has since been translated into more than thirty languages. She became a United States citizen in 2008 and continues to write and teach in Washington, D.C., where she directs the Dialogue Project at Johns Hopkins.