Plots, Secrets, Truths and Lies in Modern Iranian Historiography

Yann Richard (Professor Emeritus, Sorbonne nouvelle – Paris) studied philosophy and linguistics and has live in Iran in considerable periods of times before, during and after the 1979 revolution. He has been working on the Iranian history and the roots and the meaning of political conflicts between Iran and the West for more than four decades. He has published widely in French on different aspects of the Iranian history and politics. A number of his works have been translated into English and Persian, including Shiite Islam: Polity, Ideology and Creed (Oxford – Cambridge Mass., Basil Blackwell, 1995); and an important chapter in Nikki Keddie’s Modern Iran, Roots and Results of the Revolution (Yale University Press, 2003). Also significant in the study of the twentieth century Iran are his two volumes of edited documents on the context of the 1921 coup of Reza Khan and Seyyed Zia: CJ Edmonds, East and West of Zagros; and G. Ducrocq & H. Hoppenot, Regards français sur le coup d’Etat de 1921 en Perse (Leiden/Boston, Brill, respect. 2009 & 2015). His latest book, Iran. A Social and Political History since the Qajars (2019), is published by Cambridge University Press.