Pardis Mahdavi

Pardis Mahdavi is a bestselling author and leader in the conscious education movement. She has published seven non-fiction books and two edited volumes. She earned a BA from Occidental College, and two masters and a PhD from Columbia University. She is the author of the highly acclaimed Book of Queens: The True Story of the Middle Eastern Horsewomen Who Fought the War on Terror (Hachette Books 2023), Riding (Duke University Press, 2024), Hyphen (Bloomsbury 2021), Crossing the Gulf: Love and Family in Migrant Lives (Stanford University Press, 2016), From Trafficking to Terror (Routledge, 2016), Gridlock: Labor, Migration and Human Trafficking in Dubai (Stanford University Press, 2011) and Passionate Uprisings: Iran’s Sexual Revolution (Stanford University Press, 2008).

Her work has appeared in, among others, Time, Ms. Magazine, Huffington Post, the Los Angeles Times, and the Washington Post. Mahdavi is an expert on education, medical anthropology, and consciousness. Before stepping down from academia to start a new university, she served as President at the University of La Verne, Provost and Executive Vice President at the University of Montana, as well as Dean at Arizona State University and the University of Denver after serving in multiple roles at Pomona College. She is a lifetime member of the Council on Foreign Relations and Young President’s Organization and has been a fellow at the Social Sciences Research Council, the American Council on Learned Societies, Google Ideas, and the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. Mahdavi is on the board of directors for the Lumina Foundation, the Human Trafficking Legal Center, and the Global Religion Advisory Board.

She currently lives in Arizona where she is working on her debut novel, HorsePower, a story about awakening through exposing the limitations of the education and other systems.