Lior Sternfeld is a 2023 Templeton Fellow in the Middle East Program at the Foreign Policy Research Institute (FPRI) and an associate professor of history and Jewish Studies at Pennsylvania State University. He is a social historian of the modern Middle East with particular interests in the histories of the Jewish people and other minorities of the region. Sternfeld’s first book, titled Between Iran and Zion: Jewish Histories of Twentieth-Century Iran (Stanford University Press, 2018), examines, against the backdrop of Iranian nationalism, Zionism, and constitutionalism, the development and integration of Jewish communities in Iran into the nation-building projects of the last century.

In 2022, he co-authored with Hassan Sarbakhshian and Parvaneh Vahidmanesh Jews of Iran: A Photographic Chronicle (Penn State University Press, 2022), and together with Honaida Ghanim and Tamir Sorek, they established the journal Palestine/Israel Review, where he serves as the Associate Editor.

Sternfeld is currently working on two book projects: “The Origins of Third Worldism in the Middle East” and a new study of the Iranian-Jewish Diaspora in the U.S. and Israel.