Amanat is a graduate of Alborz High School. He received his B.A. from Tehran University in social sciences in 1971 and his D.Phil. from the Faculty of Oriental Studies, Oxford University in 1981. He studied with Albert Hourani and John Gurney as well as with Wilferd Madelung, Roger Owen, Hamid Enayat and Wilfred Knapp. The external examiner of his D.Phil. dissertation: "Emergence and Early Development of the Babi Movement, 1844-1850", successfully defended in Hilary 1981, was A.K.S. Lambton. He later was appointed as a Fellow of St. Catherine's College, Oxford. At the Faculty of Letters and Human Sciences in Tehran University Amanat studied with Gholam Hosain Sadighi, Ehsan Naraghi, Mohammad Khwansari, Ziya al-Din Sajjadi, Ahmad Fardid, Shapur Rasekh, Alimorad Davudi, and Jamshid Behnam. Amanat is the third child of Mousa Amanat, a businessman, and Besharat Khavari-Amanat, a descendant of a family of physicians. His paternal grandfather, who converted to the Bahá'í Faith at the turn of the 20th century, was engaged in the silk trade of Kashan. Abbas Amanat is a brother of the architect Hossein Amanat who designed the Shahyad Azadi Tower in Tehran, and Mehrdad Amanat, who is a historian of Iran. Abbas Amanat is married to Maryam Sanjabi-Amanat, a specialist of eighteenth-century French literature, and a senior lecturer at the Department of French Studies at Yale University.
Career
Amanat began teaching first in the Program of Religious Studies at SUNY Stony Brook in 1982 and soon after was appointed as assistant professor in the Department of History, Yale University in the fall of 1983. As of 2020, he is Professor of History and Director of the Yale Program in Iranian Studies. Amanat is a historian of Iran, Shia Islam, and the modern Middle East. He specializes in Qajar Iran as well as in the history of messianic and apocalyptic movements in the Islamic world. Among other topics he has written about Iranian identity and changing attitudes among Iranians over time. Amanat was a Carnegie Scholar of Islamic Studies and the recipient of the Mellon-Sawyer Grant for comparative study of millennialism. He was the Editor-in-Chief of Iranian Studies, journal of the International Association for Iranian Studies, and chair of the Council on Middle East Studies at Yale University. Amanat is the Consulting Editor for Qajar History at the Encyclopædia Iranica. He is the author of 25 entries in the Encyclopædia Iranica on the history of the Qajar period, including: "Constitutional Revolution," "Court and Courtiers: Qajar Period," "Fath 'Ali Shah Qajar," "Great Britain: British Influence in Persia in the 19th Century," "Historiography: Qajar Period," "Historiography: Pahlavi Period," "Islam in Iran: Messianic Movements," and "Hajji Baba of Ispahan.' Amanat has published numerous journal articles and contributed to volumes of essays. He also edited and co-edited several volumes including most recently with Assef Ashraf, The Persianate World: Rethinking A Shared Space, Leiden and Boston, Brill Publishers, 2018 and with Farzin Vejdani, Iran Facing Others: Identity Boundaries in Historical Perspective'' New York, Palgrave MacMillan, January 2012.
Books
Amanat, Abbas. Resurrection and Renewal: The Making of the Babi Movement in Iran, 1844-1850. Cornell University Press..
Amanat, Abbas. The Pivot of the Universe: Nasir al-Din Shah and the Iranian Monarchy, 1831-1896. I.B. Tauris..
Amanat, Abbas. Apocalyptic Islam and Iranian Shi'ism. I.B. Tauris..
Amanat, Abbas; Vahman, Fereydun. Az Tehran Ta Akka: Babiyan Va Bahaiyan Dar Asnad Dowran-E Qajar. Ashkaar Publishers..
Amanat, Abbas. Iran: A Modern History. Yale University Press.. This is a critical history of half a millennium of political, socioeconomic and cultural history of Iran from the rise of the Safavid Empire to the 1979 revolution and its aftermath. Since its publication it has been positively reviewed among other places in The Economist, “The New York Review of Books, ” The Wall Street Journal, The Times of London, the Sunday Times and the Literary Review.
Amanat, Abbas and Assef Ashraf . The Persianate World: Rethinking A Shared Space Leiden and Boston: Brill Publishers.
Publications
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Cities and Trade: Consul Abbot on the Economy and Society of Iran, 1847-1866
For an extensive list of academic publications see page.
