Abbas Amanat

Amanat has published numerous journal articles and contributed to volumes of essays. He also edited and co-edited several volumes including most recently with Assef Ashraf, The Persianate World: Rethinking A Shared Space, Leiden and Boston, Brill Publishers, 2018 and with Farzin Vejdani, Iran Facing Others: Identity Boundaries in Historical Perspective New York, Palgrave MacMillan, January 2012.

He specializes in Qajar Iran as well as in the history of messianic and apocalyptic movements in the Islamic world. Among other topics, he has written about Iranian identity and changing attitudes among Iranians over time. Amanat was a Carnegie Scholar of Islamic Studies (2005–2007) and the recipient of the Mellon-Sawyer Grant for comparative study of millennialism (1998–2001). He was the Editor-in-Chief of Iranian Studies, journal of the International Association for Iranian Studies (1991–98), and chair of the Council on Middle East Studies at Yale University (1993–2004).

Amanat began teaching first in the Program of Religious Studies at SUNY Stony Brook in 1982 and soon after was appointed as an assistant professor in the Department of History, Yale University in the fall of 1983. As of 2020, he is Professor of History and Director of the Yale Program in Iranian Studies. Amanat is a historian of Iran, Shia Islam, and the modern Middle East.

Amanat is a graduate of Alborz High School (Tehran, 1966). He received his B.A. degree from Tehran University in social sciences in 1971 and his D.Phil. from the Faculty of Oriental Studies, Oxford University in 1981. He studied with Albert Hourani and John Gurney as well as with Wilferd Madelung, Roger Owen, Hamid Enayat and Wilfred Knapp. The external examiner of his D.Phil. dissertation: "Emergence and Early Development of the Babi Movement, 1844–1850", successfully defended in Hilary 1981, was A.K.S. Lambton. He later was appointed as a Fellow of St. Catherine's College, Oxford (1981–82). He is the brother of architect Hossein Amanat and Mehrdad Amanat (a historian and an author).

Amanat is the Consulting Editor for Qajar History at the Encyclopædia Iranica. He is the author of 25 entries in the Encyclopædia Iranica on the history of the Qajar period, including: "Constitutional Revolution," "Court and Courtiers: Qajar Period," "Fath 'Ali Shah Qajar," "Great Britain: British Influence in Persia in the 19th Century," "Historiography: Qajar Period," "Historiography: Pahlavi Period," "Islam in Iran: Messianic Movements," and "Hajji Baba of Ispahan."