August 06, 2021
Habib Ladjevardi, the director of the Iranian Oral History Project at Harvard and a long-time faculty member at Harvard, died July 25. He was 83 years old.
Ladjevardi was born in Tehran in 1938 and came to the United States as a 12-year-old in 1950 to further his education. Eventually, he received a BA and MA from Harvard and a doctorate from Oxford University.
He returned to Iran after getting his master’s in 1963 and joined the family firm, the Behshahr Industrial Group, where he became one of the managing directors.
With the revolution, he left Iran for the United States again and joined the faculty at Harvard, where he spent the rest of his career.
He soon created and chaired the Iranian Oral History Project, interviewing many major figures of 20th Century Iran.
He also became chair of the editorial board of the Harvard Middle Eastern Monograph series starting in 1990.