Ali Mirsepassi is Professor of Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies at New York University, where he is also the Director of Iranian Studies Initiative. He is the co-author, with Tadd Fernee, of Islam, Democracy and Cosmopolitanism: At Home and in the World (Cambridge, 2014), and the author of Political Islam, Iran and Enlightenment: Philosophies of Hope and Despair (Cambridge, 2011), Democracy in Modern Iran (2010) and Intellectual Discourses and the Politics of Modernization: Negotiating Modernity in Iran (2000).