Dr Roxane Farmanfarmaian is Director of International Studies and Global Politics at the University of Cambridge Institute for Continuing Education and a Senior Research Fellow at King’s College London.
As an expert on Middle East policy and media studies, she is both a consultant and frequent speaker and broadcast commentator on current Middle East affairs, particularly on Iran, the Gulf, and the southern Mediterranean. She teaches at the Department of Political and International Studies (POLIS) at the University of Cambridge, is a member of the European Leadership Network’s Iran group which focuses on the nuclear deal (the JCPOA), and recently completed a Fellowship at the Netherlands Institute of Advanced Studies in Amsterdam.
She is currently running a research project on ‘Strategies and Ethics of Hybrid Warfare in the Gulf: Drones, Cyberwar and AI in the High-Stakes Struggle between Iran and Saudi Arabia’ for the Cambridge Middle East and North Africa Forum (MENAF).
Previously a journalist and reporter, she includes among her publications, Blood and Oil: A Prince’s Memoir of Iran From the Shah to the Ayatollah, and, Media and Political Transition in the Southern Mediterranean (2020, Routledge), the outcome of a 5-year research project at Cambridge funded by Al-Jazeera.
She obtained her PhD and MPhil from the University of Cambridge and her BA from Princeton. She currently lives in London and has a son attending the University of Southern California.