Symposium Speakers, Chairs and Moderators

Ahmad Karimi-Hakkak is director of the University of Maryland's Roshan Center for Persian Studies and a professor of Persian language and literature and Iranian culture and civilization. He has written, edited or translated over twenty books and is the author of more than a hundred major scholarly essays. He has also contributed numerous entries to The Encyclopedia Britannica, The Encylopaedia Iranica and other major reference works.

Kevin Klose is dean and professor at the University of Maryland's Philip Merrill College of Journalism. He came to the university after serving as president of National Public Radio for ten years, and as director of U.S. international broadcasting. A respected author and lecturer, Klose also spent more than two decades at The Washington Post as an editor and national and foreign correspondent.

Steven Kull, director of the Program on International Policy Attitudes and the Center on Policy Attitudes, is a political psychologist who studies world public opinion on international issues. He also plays a central role in the BBC World Service Poll of global opinion and is directing a major study of social support of anti-American terrorism in Islamic countries.

Suzanne Maloney studies Iran, the political economy of the Persian Gulf and Middle East energy policy. A former U.S. State Department policy adviser, she has also counseled private companies on Middle East issues. Maloney recently published the book Iran's Long Reach: Iran as a Pivotal State in the Muslim World.

Abbas Milani is the Hamid and Christina Moghadam Director of Iranian Studies at Stanford University, where he is also the co-director of the Iran Democracy Project at Hoover Institution. Until 1987 he taught at Tehran University's Faculty of Law and Political Science. He has written on Iran's encounter with modernity and the politics of Iran in the last half-century. His latest book is the two-volume Eminent Persians (Syracuse University Press, 2008).

Trita Parsi is the author of Treacherous Alliance: The Secret Dealings of Iran, Israel and the United States (Yale University Press, 2007), recipient of the Council on Foreign Relation's 2008 Arthur Ross Silver Medallion and president of the largest Iranian-American organization in the U.S., the National Iranian American Council.

Karim Sadjadpour, an associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, is a leading researcher on Iran. He has conducted interviews with senior Iranian officials, Iranian intellectuals, clerics, dissidents, paramilitaries, businessmen, students, activists and youth. He is a regular contributor to several radio news programs as well as The Economist, The Washington Post, The New York Times, International Herald Tribune and The New Republic.

Gary G. Sick is an American academic and analyst of Middle East affairs, with special expertise on Iran, who served on the U.S. National Security Council under Presidents Ford, Carter and, for a couple of weeks, Reagan. He has written three books and is perhaps best known for voicing support for elements of the October surprise conspiracy theory regarding the Iran Hostage Crisis and the 1980 Presidential Election in the United States.

Shibley Telhami is the Anwar Sadat Professor for Peace and Development at the University of Maryland and the nonresident senior fellow at the Saban Center for Middle East Policy at the Brookings Institution. He has taught at several universities and is the author of the best-selling book The Stakes: America and the Middle East (Westview Press, 2003; updated version, 2004).

James Walsh is an expert in international security and a research associate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His research focus on international security, especially topics involving weapons of mass destruction and terrorism. Among his current projects are two series of dialogues on nuclear issues, one with representatives from North Korea and one with leading figures in Iran. He has traveled to both countries and has testified before the Senate on Iran's nuclear program.

Robin Wright is a prominent American journalist, author and foreign affairs analyst who has reported from more than 140 countries on six continents. Author of several books on Iran and the Middle East, including Dreams and Shadows: The Future of the Middle East, She has been affiliated with several U.S. universities and think tanks and lectures widely all over the world.