Azar Nafisi is a professor at Johns Hopkins University. She has also taught English Literature at the University of Tehran, the free Islamic University and Allameh Tabatabai University in Iran. She was expelled from the University for refusing to wear the veil and left Iran for the United States in 1997. 

She has written for The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, and The New Republic, has appeared frequently on radio and television programs, and is the author of Anti-Terra: A Critical Study of Vladimir Nabokov’s Novels and Reading Lolita in Tehran.

She lives in Washington, D.C.