Professor Ali Gheissari is Visiting Research Professor at the Middle East Institute, National University of Singapore. He studied law and political science at Tehran University, sociology at Essex University, and history with concentration on Iranian studies at St. Antony’s College, Oxford University, and held visiting appointments at Tehran University, the Iranian Institute of Philosophy, UCLA, Brown University, and St. Antony’s College, Oxford. Professor Gheissari teaches history at the University of San Diego and has research interest in the intellectual history and politics of modern Iran and has written extensively in Persian and English on modern Iranian. His books include Contemporary Iran: Economy, Society, Politics (ed., Oxford University Press, 2009); Tabriz and Rasht in the Iranian Constitutional Revolution (ed., Tehran, 2008); Democracy in Iran: History and the Quest for Liberty (co-author, Oxford University Press, 2006, 2009); Iranian Intellectuals in the Twentieth Century (University of Texas Press, 1998, 2008). He is currently completing a book manuscript on aspects of legal and constitutional history of modern Iran (forthcoming by Cambridge University Press). Dr. Gheissari serves on the Editorial Board of Iran Studies book series published by Brill (Leiden) and is also the Editor-in-Chief of the journal Iranian Studies.