Arash Azizi is a writer and historian. He is a Postdoctoral Associate and lecturer at Yale University and a contributing writer at the Atlantic. He is the author of “The Shadow Commander: Soleimani, the US and Iran’s Global Ambitions” (Oneworld, 2020) and “What Iranians Want: Women, Life, Freedom” (Oneworld, 2024.) He is writing a book on Iran and Israel to be published by Public Affairs (a division of Basic Books).
His writings and commentary on politics, history and cinema have appeared in numerous other outlets including New York Times, New York Review of Books, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, Liberties, Newsweek, New Lines, Haaretz, Daily Beast, Jacobin, Foreign Policy and the Toronto Star.
He holds a PhD in history and Middle Eastern studies from NYU. His dissertation was about the communist movement in the Middle East during the global Cold War. He is a board member at the Nonviolent Initiative for Democracy. He used to co-host a popular news shows for Iranian audiences and his broadcasting and radio and television appearances have been aired from BBC World, CNN, i24, Iran International, DW, CTV, CBC, ABC Australia, amongst other channels.
About a dozen of his book-length translations have appeared in Iran and abroad.
Arash’s work has been translated to 18 languages including Spanish, Arabic, Kurdish, Russian, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Urdu, Bengali, Turkish, Greek, Japanese, Malagasy, Azerbaijani, Dutch, Indonesian and Chinese.
He has also written and produced movies which can be found on his IMDB profile. “Into Schrodinger’s Box,” a film he co-wrote and co-produced, is available to watch on Fandor via Amazon. He has served on film festival juries in Spain, Portugal, UK and the United States.