John Ghazvinian (Persian: جان قزوینیان, born April 23, 1977) is an Iranian-American author, historian, and former journalist. He is a noted authority on the history of U.S.-Iran relations and is best known for his book, America and Iran: A History, 1720 to the Present – named by the New York Times as one of “100 Notable Books of 2021”. Ghazvinian is the Executive Director of the Middle East Center at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. He previously worked as a journalist and has written for Newsweek, The Nation, The Washington Post, The Sunday Times, and Politico. In 2009, he received a high-profile fellowship from the Carnegie Corporation, and in 2016 another fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities – both in support of his research on the history of U.S.–Iran relations. He is also the author of Untapped: The Scramble for Africa’s Oil (Harcourt, 2007) and co-editor of American and Muslim Worlds Before 1900 (Bloomsbury, 2020). Early life and education Ghazvinian was born in Iran but left with his family at the age of one and was raised in London and Los Angeles. He received his undergraduate degree from Brown University and a masters and doctorate in history from Oxford University. He subsequently worked as a stringer in the London bureau of Newsweek in the early 2000s, where he reported and wrote on a range of stories in the United Kingdom and Western Europe. From 2006–2007, Ghazvinian was an Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at the Penn Humanities Forum. In 2007-2009 he was a Senior Fellow in the Center for Programs in Contemporary Writing, at the University of Pennsylvania. He subsequently taught modern Middle East history at several colleges and universities in the Philadelphia area before joining the University of Pennsylvania Middle East Center in January 2018. Ghazvinian currently resides in Philadelphia. Career Ghazvinian's first book, Untapped: The Scramble for Africa's Oil (Harcourt, 2007), an exposé of the petroleum industry in Africa, received widespread praise. Andrew Leonard at Salon wrote that the book "should be must reading for anyone who still believes that unregulated markets are the best way to cure all the ills of the poor nations of the world." The Boston Globe called Untapped a "riveting account and superb analysis of what African oil means to a fuel-hungry world and to the African nations involved." The New York Times called the book "perceptive" and said that