The Foreign Policy Institute
Cultural Conversations provides a forum in which current assumptions and frameworks can be critically examined and new ways of understanding policy challenges begin to emerge.
This approach is built on the insight that the right knowledge to resolve a policy dilemma is often in a different place than the problem source. At Cultural Conversations, we provide an interdisciplinary approach that includes knowledge from across the humanities and the social sciences which is an essential tool of comprehensive policy analysis.
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We strive to bring theory and practice together through mutually critical angles that will serve to enhance debates with the goal of improving the understanding and practice of foreign policy.
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We invite individuals to come together on our forum and join the debates we examine with an eye to understanding and improving the world of foreign policy making.
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We welcome your comments on our blog and video posts and invite you to propose new topics on issues that call for deeper examination.
Who we are
Azar Nafisi is a Visiting Professor and the executive director of Cultural Conversations at the Foreign Policy Institute of Johns Hopkins University's School of Advanced International Studies in Washington, DC. She is best known as the author of the national bestseller Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books, which has been translated into 32 languages, and Things I Have Been Silent About, about culture, history, and loss. She has also written for The New York Times, Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, The Financial Times, The Guardian and The New Republic, among others. Her children’s book (with illustrator Sophie Benini Pietromarchi) BiBi and the Green Voice was published by the Italian Press, Adelphi, in 2006. She is currently working on a book entitled Reading Huckleberry Finn in America: Dispatches from the Republic of the Imagination a powerful and passionate case for the vital role of fiction in America today. She lives in Washington, DC.
Leila Golestaneh Austin, Ph.D., SAIS Professorial Lecturer in Global Theory and History and Middle East Studies, currently serves as director of Cultural Conversations at the Foreign Policy Institute and co-director director of The Global Politics and Religion Initiative at SAIS. She also teaches at American University and Georgetown University. Dr. Austin’s research interests include the role of religion, literature and political culture more generally in defining politics and policy-making, history and politics of the Middle East and North Africa, and political economic policy in the Middle East and Latin America. She received her Ph.D. in political science from Columbia University and her M.A. in International Affairs from the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS). Dr. Austin’s most recent articles include: The New Opposition in Iran (2010) and The Politics of Youth Bulge: From Islamic Activism to Democratic Reform in the Middle East and North Africa (2011).
Fresh Voices,
Vision, and Discussion.
Cultural conversations brings together students, faculty, and the broader policy community to find solutions to today's challenges through a new set of lenses.