Homa Katouzian

Homa Katouzian is an economist, historian, sociologist and literary critic, with a special interest in Iranian studies. Katouzian's formal academic training was in economics and the social sciences but he concurrently continued his studies of Persian history and literature at a professional academic level. He began studying the life and works of the modern Persian writer, Sadeq Hedayat, and that of the Prime Minister of Iran in the early 1950s, Mohammad Mosaddeq, while still a faculty member in the department of economics at the University of Kent at Canterbury. Having taught economics at universities in Britain and other countries for eighteen years, he took voluntary retirement from the University of Kent (UK) in 1986 to devote his entire time to Iranian studies. In recent years, he has been teaching and writing on classical Persian literature, in particular the 13th-century poet and writer, Sa'di. Currently based at the University of Oxford, Katouzian is a member of the Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies He was a reperch fellow at St Antony's College, University of Oxford (2004-2025) where for thirteen years he edited the bimonthly Iranian Studies, the journal of the Association for Iranian Studies. He is Editor of the International Journal of Persian Literature, Co-editor, Routledge's Iranian studies book series, and Associate Editor, Springer Iranian and Persian Studies Series. He is also a former member of the editorial board of Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East and Comparative Economic Studies.