July 1999

Biography

MAJID TEHRANIAN is professor of international communication at the University of Hawaii and director of the Toda Institute for Global Peace and Policy Research. A political economist by education, he received his bachelor's degree from Dartmouth College and his master's and doctoral degrees from Harvard University. He has taught at Harvard, Oxford, Tufts, Southern California, and Tehran universities. His teaching and research have focused on the international political economy of culture, communication, development, democracy, and peace. He also specializes in Middle Eastern and Asia-Pacific affairs. He is former director of Communication and Development Institute (Tehran), program specialist in Communication Research and Planning at UNESCO (Paris), trustee of the International Institute of Communications (London), convenor of International Peace Research Association, and council member of Asia-Pacific Peace Research Association. He has served on the editorial boards of several publications, including Iranian Studies, Communication and Development Review, Communication Theory, Communication Research, Asian Journal of Communication, Communication and Information Sciences Series, Journal of International Communication, and International Encyclopedia of Communications. He currently edits Peace & Policy, and the Toda Institute book series. He has authored more than 10 books and about 100 articles. His articles have appeared in a variety of scholarly journals. They have been also translated into French, Spanish, German, Norwegian, Finnish, Polish, Slovenian, Korean, Japanese, Bahasa Malay, Arabic, and Persian.

At the University of Hawaii where he has taught since 1981, Tehranian has served as chairman of the Department of Communication and a founding member and director of the Spark M. Matsunaga Institute for Peace. He also has initiated and directed such programs as the Pacific Peace Seminar, Dialog on Peace television series, and served on the Faculty Senate and the Board of Directors of the UH Professional Assembly. He has received the UH/EWC Collaborative Research Grant (twice), the Hawaii Interactive Television System's Curriculum Development Grant, a Presidential Citation for Meritorious Teaching, and the Fujio Matsuda Scholar Grant.

Tehranian is an internationally recognized scholar. He is Fellow of the World Academy of Arts and Sciences, cited in Who's Who in the World, Who's Who in America, and Who's Who in Communications and the Media. He is the recipient of Soka University's Award of Highest Honor and Honorary Doctorate, a US Institute of Peace research grant, and the Distinguished Service Award of the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication. Tehranian is a global nomad banished to paradise where he surfs the Net and the Pacific. He can be reached at majid@hawaii.edu.