"I Learned Persian in Evin Prison" w/ Xiyue Wang

Iran Uncovered

This week's episode is covers Western media coverage of Iran, bias in the American academy, China, and much more with Xiyue Wang. Saeed Ghasseminejad and Cameron Khansarinia explore the human angle of US policy towards the Islamic Republic and what one learns after 40 months in the Islamic Republic in Iran's most notorious prison.

Iran Uncovered is a podcast by NUFDI bringing you experts, activists, and newsmakers to talk #Iran. It is hosted by Saeed Ghasseminejad and Cameron Khansarinia.

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About this week's guest.

Wang Xiyue is a Jeane Kirkpatrick Visiting Research Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), where his research focuses on the history and regional affairs of the Middle East (with an emphasis on Iran), China, Russia, and Eurasia. He is concurrently a PhD candidate in history at Princeton University, where he specializes in Imperial Russia and the Soviet Union, the late Ottoman Empire, the modern Middle East, and modern China. He is especially interested in great-power rivalries in the Middle East and in how the Soviets and Chinese interacted with Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary regime, and how such interactions shaped the geopolitics in the region since the late 1970s

Mr. Wang came to national prominence through his analyses on Iran that combine scholarly insights with in-country experience: in August 2016, on an academic visit to Iran as a Princeton graduate student, he was detained by Iranian authorities, falsely charged with espionage, and imprisoned in Evin Prison in Tehran. In July 2017, he was formally sentenced to 10 years in prison. Mr. Wang was released in a prisoner swap between the US and Iran in December 2019.

Since his release, Mr. Wang has written about his experience in Iran in Foreign Affairs. His writings on US-Iranian relations and Sino-Iranian relations have been widely published in Bloomberg Opinion, Foreign Policy, and RealClearWorld, among others. Mr. Wang is fluent in Chinese and Farsi, proficient in French, German, Pashto, Russian, Turkish, and Urdu.

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