Release: Wang Xiyue Joins AEI as a Jeane Kirkpatrick Fellow
January 04, 2021
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: Washington, DC (January 4, 2021)
Kori Schake, director of Foreign and Defense Policy Studies at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), announced today that Wang Xiyue is joining AEI as a Jeane Kirkpatrick Fellow. The Jeane Kirkpatrick Fellows Program is designed to mentor talented foreign and defense policy scholars by offering doctoral students, postdoctoral students, and junior faculty the opportunity to work alongside senior AEI resident scholars and develop and disseminate their own research over a two-year term.
“The American Enterprise Institute is committed to defending human dignity, expanding human potential, and building a freer and safer world,” said Ms. Schake. “We’re just thrilled that Wang Xiyue is joining us to advance those goals. His scholarship on China and the Middle East will add to AEI’s already distinguished record of public policy analysis in those areas, and we very much look forward to having him as a colleague.”
Mr. Wang’s research focuses on the history and regional affairs of the Middle East (with an emphasis on Iran), China, Russia, and Eurasia. He is concurrently a PhD candidate in history at Princeton University, where he specializes in Imperial Russia and the Soviet Union, the late Ottoman Empire, the modern Middle East, and modern China. He is especially interested in great-power rivalries in the Middle East, Soviet and Chinese interactions with Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary regime, and how these interactions have shaped regional geopolitics since the late 1970s.
Mr. Wang came to national prominence through his analyses on Iran that combine scholarly insights with in-country experience: On an academic visit to Iran as a Princeton graduate student in August 2016, he was detained by Iranian authorities, falsely charged with espionage, and imprisoned in Tehran. In July 2017, he was formally sentenced to 10 years in prison. Mr. Wang was released in a prisoner swap between the US and Iran in December 2019.
Before attending Princeton University in 2013, Mr. Wang was a research analyst for Eurasia Capital in Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia, and Beijing, China. He also served as a Pashto interpreter for the International Committee of the Red Cross in Kabul and Kandahar in Afghanistan, where he translated discussions between the Red Cross and Taliban representatives and Afghan government authorities.
Mr. Wang has written about his experience in Iran in Foreign Affairs. His writings on US-Iranian relations and Sino-Iranian relations have been widely published in outlets such as Bloomberg Opinion, Foreign Policy, and RealClearWorld. He is fluent in Chinese and Persian and proficient in French, German, Pashto, Russian, Turkish, and Urdu.
In additional to being a PhD candidate in history at Princeton University, Mr. Wang has an MA in history from Princeton University, an AM in regional studies (Russia, Eastern Europe, and Central Asia) from Harvard University, and a BA in international studies and Hindi-Urdu languages from the University of Washington.
Said Wang Xiyue, “As a Jeane Kirkpatrick Fellow, I am very much looking forward to working on US policies and strategies relating to Iran and China and, most of all, collaborating with and learning from my colleagues at AEI.”
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