Saïd Amir Arjomand

Guest of the Principal, SCAS.
Distinguished Service Professor of Sociology, Stony Brook University, NY

Saïd Amir Arjomand was awarded his Ph.D. at the University of Chicago in 1980. He has
been Distinguished Service Professor of Sociology at the State University of New York at
Stony Brook since 2004 and has served as Director of the Stony Brook Institute for Global
Studies (2008–2017). He is the founder and president of the Association for the Study of
Persianate Societies and the editor of its interdisciplinary organ, Journal of Persianate Studies.
He is also a consulting editor for Encyclopaedia Iranica and Senior Research Fellow of the
Multiple Secularities Project at the Universität Leipzig. He has published extensively in humanities
and social science journals and is the author of several books, including The Shadow of God
and the Hidden Imam: Religion, Political Order and Societal Change in Shi'ite Iran from the
Beginning to 1890
(l984; new ed., 2010); The Turban for the Crown: The Islamic Revolution
in Iran
(1988); and Rethinking Civilizational Analysis (with Edward Tiryakian, 2004), and
most recently After Khomeini: Iran under His Successors (2009); The Rule of Law, Islam and
Constitutional Politics in Egypt and Iran
(with Nathan J. Brown, 2013); Worlds of Difference
(with Elisa Reis, 2013); Social Theory and Regional Studies in the Global Age (2014); The
Arab Revolution of 2011: A Comparative Perspective
(2015); and Sociology of Shi`ite Islam:
Collected Essays
(2016).

During his residence at SCAS, Arjomand will be working on his contribution to the Collegium’s
May 2018 Karlgren–Eisenstadt symposium on “Rethinking Modernity: Entanglements and Ruptures,
1770–Present.”

This information is accurate as of the academic year 2017-18.