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 Encyclo-
paedia 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 (1984; new ed., 2010); The Turban for the Crown: The Islamic
Revolution in Iran (1988); 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 Compara-
tive Perspective (2015); Sociology of Shi`ite Islam: Collected Essays (2016); and Revolution: Structure
and Meaning in World History (2019).

During his residence at SCAS, Arjomand will be working on the Persianate conceptions of the state,
sovereignty and law in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

This information is accurate as of the academic year 2018-19.