Haleh Esfandiari is a distinguished Iranian-American public intellectual. The founding director of the Woodrow Wilson Center’s Middle East Program, she is the former deputy secretary general of the Women’s Organization of Iran and has taught at Princeton University. She has worked in Iran as a journalist and is the author of Reconstructed Lives: Women and Iran’s Islamic Revolution and My Prison, My Home: One Woman's Story of Captivity in Iran. She lives in Maryland with her husband, Shaul Bakhash, a professor at George Mason University.