Abbas Milani

Abbas Malekzadeh Milani
Milani in an interview with Parazit (VOA-PNN)
Born	1949 (age 67–68) Tehran, Iran
Nationality	Iranian American
Fields	Political science and Iranian studies
Institutions	University of Tehran National University of Iran University of California, Berkeley Notre Dame de Namur University Stanford University
Alma mater	University of California, Berkeley University of Hawaii

Abbas Malekzadeh Milani (Persian: عباس ملک‌زاده میلانی‎‎; born 1949) is an Iranian-American historian and author. Milani is a visiting professor of Political Science and the director of the Iranian Studies program at Stanford University. He is also a research fellow and co-director of the Iran Democracy Project at Stanford University's Hoover Institution. Milani has found evidence that Persian modernism dates back to more than 1000 years ago.

Milani was born in Iran to a prosperous family and was sent to California when he was sixteen, graduating from Oakland Technical High School in 1966 after only one year of studies. Milani earned his B.A. in political science and economics from the University of California, Berkeley in 1970 and his Ph.D. in political science from the University of Hawaii in 1974.

With his girlfriend Fereshteh, Milani returned to Iran to serve as an assistant professor of political science at the National University of Iran from 1975 to 1977. He lectured on Marxist themes veiled in metaphor but was jailed for one year as a political prisoner for "activities against the government". He was a research fellow at the Iranian Center for Social Research from 1977 to 1978. He was also an assistant professor of law and political science at the University of Tehran and a member of the board of directors of Tehran University's Center for International Studies from 1979 to 1986, but after the Iranian Revolution he was not allowed to publish or teach. With his son Hamid and his wife Fereshteh, he left Iran in 1986.