Dr Roxane Farmanfarmaian

Dr Roxane Farmanfarmaian is Director of International Studies and Global Politics at the University of Cambridge Institute for Continuing Education, and a specialist in Middle East politics, security, and energy with a particular focus on Iran.

She teaches the International Relations of the Modern Middle East at the Politics Faculty (POLIS) at Cambridge, where she served as editor of the Cambridge Review of International Relations for six years beginning in 2002, and where she obtained both her MPhil and PhD. Her PhD focused on Anglo-American Relations with Iran from the Shah through the Revolution, the Salman Rushdie Affair, and the initial stages of the War on Terror.

She wrote Blood and Oil: Inside Iran from the Shah to the Ayatollah (Random House), and has published in numerous academic journals including Media, Culture and Society, Journal of North African Studies, and Middle East Critique. She has also edited a number of collected volumes, among them Media and Politics in the Southern Mediterranean (Routledge 2021), and War and Peace in Qajar Persia (IB Tauris 2008). In 2014, she received $1 million from Al-Jazeera Broadcasting to conduct a five-year research project on Media and Politics after the Arab Uprisings and the Gezi Park Protests in Turkey, the largest private award to the University of Cambridge School of Humanities and Social Sciences.

Roxane frequently writes and comments for the media on Middle East politics, the nuclear issue, and Western relations with the Gulf among other topics, having been a journalist in Tehran, Moscow and New York before pursuing academia. She appears regularly on the BBC, Sky News and Al-Jazeera, and has been published most recently by The Hill and Foreign Policy. She has also served as an advisor to the UK military and to the House of Lords, as well as numerous corporations, on issues relating to the Middle East and the media.

She is a Senior Associate Fellow at the European Leadership Network, an Advisory Board member of the Institute of Peace and Diplomacy (in Canada) and served as a Resident Fellow at the Netherlands Institute of Advanced Study from 2017-2018. She received her BA from Princeton in Near East Studies.