Abbas Amanat is William Graham Sumner Professor Emeritus of History at Yale University. He received his B.A. from Tehran University in 1971 and his Doctorate of Philosophy from the School of Oriental Studies, University of Oxford, in 1981. He taught at Yale University between 1983 and 2021. He has written about early modern and modern history of Iran, the Middle East, the Muslim world and the Persianate world, including Iran: A Modern History.
Amanat has served as the director of the Ghasem Ghani Project at Yale University Library, as the Chair of the Council on Middle East Studies at Yale University, and as the Director of the Yale Program in Iranian Studies at the Yale MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies.