Kevin Schwartz is a recent Social Science Research Council postdoctoral fellow for Transregional Research and Visiting Scholar at Roshan Institute for Persian Studies at the University of Maryland. He received his Ph.D. in Near Eastern Studies from the University of California, Berkeley, where he studied and wrote about Persian literary culture across West, Central, and South Asia. His writings on the politics, culture, and history of Iran and the Middle East have been featured in The Baltimore Sun, Jadaliyya, CounterPunch, and Reorient. He can be reached at k.lewis.schwartz@gmail.com.