Roya Hakakian is an Iranian-American writer, journalist, and public speaker. Her opinion columns, essays, and book reviews appear in leading English language publications including The New York Times, The New York Review of Books and The Atlantic. A founding member of the Iran Human Rights Documentation Center, she has spoken on a variety of news outlets, from CNN’s Fareed Zakaria GPS to MSNBC, as well as in Washington D.C. for the Senate Foreign Affairs Committee and the State Department with U.S. Secretary Antony Blinken. Her latest book A Beginner’s Guide to America: For the Immigrant and the Curious has been called a contemporary Tocquevlllian account by The Wall Street Journal and The Boston Globe.
She is a recipient of the Guggenheim Fellowship among many other prizes and has been called one of “the most important activists, academics and journalists of her generation.”

Cosponsored by the Boston College International Studies Program, Islamic Civilization and Societies Program, and with the support of an ILA Major Grant.