at Santa Barbara will be presenting its first annual lecture series event January 13.
“Iran After the Green Movement,” a panel discussion featuring Nazila Fathi, Mehdi Khalaji and Robert Dreyfuss at the UC campus, is being put on by Program Director and Religious Studies Professor Janet Afary with the support from the Duncan and Suzanne Mellichamp Fund for Global Religion.
According to Afary, the three featured speakers have written some of the best analyses of Iran’s Green Movement. The movement that emerged following the disputed June 12, 2009, presidential elections in which President Ahmadi-nejad was officially declared president for a second term.
Fathi, who previously worked for Time magazine, was based in Tehran as a reporter for The New York Times between 2001 and 2009. Fathi will be speaking about women as agents of change in contemporary Iran.
Khalaji, a senior fellow at The Washington Institute for Near East Policy whose focus is the politics of Iran and Shiite groups in the Middle East, has served on the editorial boards of two prominent Iranian publications. Khalaji will be speaking about the ideological crisis in Iran.
Dreyfuss works as an independent journalist specializing in politics and national security and has also been a regular contributor to Rolling Stone and The Nation magazines. He currently covers national security for Rolling Stone’s National Affairs section and writes the Dreyfus Report blog, which is published on TheNation.com. Dreyfuss will be speaking about the effect of sanctions in Iran.