Dr. Roxane Farmanfarmaian is a Research Associate in the Department of Sociology and an Affiliated Lecturer in International Relations of the Middle East and North Africa, University of Cambridge. She is the Principal Investigator on the University of Cambridge – Al Jazeera Centre of Studies Media Project, a four-year, £680,000 research project begun in 2013 and looking at media in political transition across the Southern Mediterranean, from Turkey to Morocco.
Roxane Farmanfarmaian obtained her PhD in international studies from Cambridge University, where she was a Donner Scholar of Atlantic Relations and a member of New Hall College.
She is the author of Blood and Oil: A Prince's Memoir of Iran, From the Shah to the Ayatollah (Random House 2005, now in its fourth edition), and editor of War and Peace in Qajar Persia: Implications Past and Present (Routledge 2008). She was editor-in-chief of the Cambridge Review of International Affairs from 2002-2005, and a founding member of the Centre of International Relations of the Middle East and North Africa (CIRMENA) affiliated with the Department of Political and International Studies (POLIS), University of Cambridge.
Roxane was born in Salt Lake City, Utah. and grew up in Holland, and obtained her BA in Middle East Studies from Princeton University. She lived in Iran during the revolution and hostage crisis, where she became a journalist and published a weekly news magazine, The Iranian. Subsequently, she moved to Moscow, working as a reporter and witnessing the cracks that eventually led to the fall of Soviet communism. Returning to New York, she worked for several years in commercial magazines, including Working Woman and McCall's, and as a freelancer, published in The New York Times, The Times of London and Businessweek. In 1997 she published Blood and Oil in conjunction with her father; at the time, she was also West Coast editor of Publishers Weekly. Among her publications was a piece comparing her Utah and Iranian background, published in Half and Half: Writers on being Bi-Racial and Bi-National. In 2001 Roxane obtained her Masters of Philosophy in International Studies, at Cambridge University and as a member of Queens College. Her PhD received an Honourable Mention from the International Society of Iranian Studies (ISIS). She was the inaugural Visiting Fellow at the Al-Jazeera Centre of Studies in 2012, and a Visiting Scholar at the Hinckley Institute and Centre of Middle East Studies at the University of Utah from 2010-1013.