Ali Banuazizi is Professor of Cultural Psychology at Boston College and Codirector of the Program in Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies. After receiving his Ph. D. from Yale University in 1968, he taught at Yale and the University of Southern California before joining the Boston College Faculty in 1971. Since then, he has held visiting appointments at the University of Tehran, Princeton, Harvard, M.I.T., and Oxford University.
Ali Banuazizi served as Editor of the journal of Iranian Studies, from 1968 to 1982. He is a past President of the International Society for Iranian Studies, a member of the Advisory Committee of Encyclopaedia Iranica, and the current President of the Middle East Studies Association of North America (MESA).
He is the author of numerous articles on society, culture, and politics in Iran and the Middle East, and the coeditor (with Myron Weiner) of three books on politics, religion and society in Southwest and Central Asia, including The State, Religion, and Ethnic Politics in Afghanistan, Iran, and Pakistan (1986), The Politics of Social Transformation in Afghanistan, Iran, and Pakistan (1994), and The New Geopolitics of Central Asia and Its Borderlands (1994).