Dr. Reza Parchizadeh is a political theorist, historian of ideas, and analyst. He holds a bachelor’s degree and a master’s degree in English from University of Tehran and a Ph.D. in English from Indiana University of Pennsylvania (IUP), all with honors. Parchizadeh wrote his master’s thesis on Middle Eastern and Orientalist philosophy and political thought and his doctoral dissertation on theology, political thought, and cultural studies in the West, and defended both with distinction. His areas of interest are medieval and early modern political thought, Renaissance literature, Protestant Reformation, Judeo-Christian roots of liberalism, British imperialism, Islamic history and culture, modern and postmodern totalitarianism, and patterns of modernization and Westernization in the Middle East and the Far East. Parchizadeh is a member of the international committee of correspondents for the World Shakespeare Bibliography, a joint project of Johns Hopkins University and the Shakespeare Association of America that constitutes the single-largest Shakespeare database in the world. You can follow him on Academia and Twitter at @rezaparchizadeh.