Saïd Amir Arjomand (Ph.D, University of Chicago, 1980) is Distinguished Service Professor of Sociology at the State University of New York at Stony Brook.  He has been at Stony Brook since 1978, and is currently the Editor-in-Chief of “Studies on Persianate Societies”. Arjomand is the author of The Shadow of God and the Hidden Imam: Religion, Political Organization and Societal Change in Shi’ite Iran from the Beginning to l890, the University of Chicago Press, l984, and The Turban for the Crown. The Islamic revolution in Iran, Oxford University Press, 1988. He served as the Section’s Secretary-Treasurer from 1987 to 1990. His article, “Constitutions and the Struggle for Political Order: A Study in the Modernization of Political Traditions,” European Journal of Sociology, 33.4 (1992), won the Section’s Award for the Best Essay in Comparative and Historical Sociology in 1993.More recently, he has published “The Law, Agency and Policy in Medieval Islamic Society: Development of the Institutions of Learning from the Tenth to the Fifteenth Century,” Comparative Studies in Society and History, 41.2 (1999), and “Civil Society and the Rule of Law in the Constitutional Politics of Iran under Khatami,” Social Research, 76.2 (2000). Arjomand is concurrently working on two major comparative projects, “Revolution in World History,” which will be published as a book by the University of Chicago Press, “Constitutional Law and Political Modernization in the Islamic Middle East,” which has been supported by a grant from the National Science Foundation. Professor Arjomand was on leave during the 2004-2005 Academic Year as the Crane Inaugural Fellow in Law and Public Policy at the Woodrow Wilson School, Princeton University.

From http://www.sunysb.edu/sociology/faculty/Arjomand/arjomand.html