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Navid Hassanpour

Navid Hassanpour's picture
Associate Research Scholar and Lecturer in Political Science — 2019-2020

Navid Hassanpour was Born (1980) and raised in Iran: Isfahan, Tehran, finally Babol (a small town in Northern Iran) where he finished high school, and consequently entered college at Sharif University of Technology in Tehran in 1998, after being ranked 8th/400,000 nation-wide in the entrance exam among Math/Physics majors. He entered Stanford University’s Electrical Engineering Ph.D. Program in 2002 with a Master’s degree from Sharif. Graduated in June 2006 with a Ph.D. in engineering from Stanford after having written a doctoral dissertation on Network Information Theory. Returned to Stanford, after two years of employment at Qualcomm Inc. in San Diego, for a graduate degree in Political Philosophy in 2008-09, started a Ph.D. at Yale Political Science Department in 2009, graduating from Yale University in 2014 with a second Ph.D. in Political Science, with a dissertation on civil conflict and collective action that was published as a book by Cambridge University Press and was recognized by a Best Book Award (2015-17) from American Political Science Association’s Political Networks Section. Since 2014, he has worked at Princeton’s Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, as a Niehaus Fellow in Regional Political Economy (2014-15), at Columbia University in the City of New York, as a Lecturer at Quantitative Methods in the Social Sciences (QMSS) Program (2015-16), and in Moscow, Russia, as an Associate Professor in Political Science at Higher School of Economics (HSE), where he taught Comparative Politics, Quantitative Research Methods, and International Relations. He has spent time visiting State Archives in Iran, Russia, Turkey, and China, have conducted fieldwork in Russia, Turkey, Iran, China and Italy since 2015. At HSE, he lead a research team working on data-oriented studies of political participation and institutional transformation in Russia, Germany, Iran, Turkey, China and Japan. After a three month visit to European University Institute in Florence, Italy in Spring 2019, he will be an Associate Research Scholar at The MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies at Yale University in 2019-20 while working on his second book (Revise & Resubmit at Cambridge University Press) on the political origins of dictatorship and democracy.