The Wall Street Journal reported on February 9, 2009 that Richard Holbrooke has hired Vali Reza Nasr to advise the Obama Administration on US-Iran relations.
Nasir is an Iranian-American academic and scholar, as well as Professor of International Politics at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy of Tufts University. An expert in contemporary Middle Eastern affairs, Islam, and politics, in January, 2006, Nasr was named the Adjunct Senior Fellow for Middle Eastern Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations, a nonpartisan think-tank focusing on foreign policy. He is also a Senior Fellow with The Dubai Initiative, Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. He was named Carnegie Scholar in 2006.
Nasr is the author of The Shia Revival, The Islamic Leviathan, Democracy in Iran, The Vanguard of the Islamic Revolution: The Jama`at-i Islami of Pakistan, and Mawdudi and the Making of Islamic Revivalism.
Nasr has long been engaged in debates in the Muslim world on Islam, democracy and accommodating modernity. His most influential work has been on the importance of sectarian identity in Middle East politics and the growing importance of Shia politics following the Iraq war.
In August 2006, Nasr briefed George W. Bush on the dynamics of sectarian violence in Iraq. He has also testified before the US Senate and advised members of both houses of the US Congress on Middle East issues. In 2007-08 he served as an adviser to Democratic presidential candidates.
Born in 1960 in Tehran, Nasr is the son of Seyyed Hossein Nasr, an Islamic philosopher, historian of science, and a university professor of Islamic Studies at George Washington University.
