Vali Nasr

Dean of John Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies

Brookings Institute Senior Fellow

Vali Nasr is a Middle East scholar, foreign policy adviser and commentator on international relations whose recent book The Dispensable Nation takes a critical look at U.S. foreign policy in the Obama White House.  His other recent books, Forces of Fortune and The Shia Revival, foresaw the postwar sectarian violence in Iraq and the uprisings known as the Arab Spring and contributed to U.S. policy formulated in response to those events.

Prior to being named SAIS dean, Nasr was a professor of international politics at Tufts University's Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy. From 2009 to 2011, he was special adviser to the president's special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan. He served on the faculties of the Naval Postgraduate School, Stanford University, the University of California, San Diego and the University of San Diego. He was a Carnegie Scholar and a senior fellow at Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government and an adjunct senior fellow for Middle Eastern studies at the Council on Foreign Relations. He is currently a senior fellow in foreign policy at the Brookings Institution, a member of the U.S. Department of State's Foreign Affairs Policy Board, and director of the Rockefeller Brothers Fund and the National Democratic Institute. He received his Ph.D. in political science from Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).