Vartan Gregorian Biography

The Carnegie Corporation of New York, a grant-making organization established by Andrew Carnegie in 1911, is led by Vartan Gregorian as its eleventh president. Gregorian served as Brown University's sixteenth president for nine years until assuming his present post in June 1997. He was raised in Lebanon after completing his secondary school in Iran. He was born to Armenian parents in Tabriz, Iran. He enrolled at Stanford University in 1956 and majored in history and the humanities there before earning his degree with honors in 1958. In 1964, Stanford bestowed upon him a Ph.D. in history and the humanities. In San Francisco State College, the University of California at Los Angeles, and the University of Texas at Austin, Gregorian has taught European and Middle Eastern history. He was designated Tarzian Professor of History and professor of South Asian history at the University of Pennsylvania when he joined the faculty there in 1972. In 1974, he served as the University of Pennsylvania's first dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences. Four years later, he was named the university's twenty-third provost, a position he held until 1981. Gregorian led the New York Public Library, an organization with a network of 83 circulating libraries and four research libraries, for eight years (1981–1989). He was chosen to lead Brown University in 1989. The Road to Home: My Life and Times, Islam: A Mosaic, Not A Monolith, and The Emergence of Modern Afghanistan, 1880–1946 are all written by Gregorian. He has received numerous fellowships, including those from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, the American Council of Learned Societies, the Social Science Research Council, and the American Philosophical Society. He is a member of Phi Beta Kappa and a Ford Foundation Foreign Area Training Fellow. He is a Fellow of the American Philosophical Society and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He won the E.H. Harbison Distinguished Teaching Award from the Danforth Foundation in 1969. He is on a number of boards, including those for the American Academy in Berlin and the National September 11 Memorial and Museum. He sat on the boards of the Aga Khan University, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the Aga Khan University, Brandeis University, Human Rights Watch, The Museum of Modern Art, and the McGraw-Hill Companies. The governments of France, Italy, Austria, and Portugal have all decorated him. Numerous honorary degrees from universities such as Brown, Dartmouth, Drew, Johns Hopkins, University of Pennsylvania, the Jewish Theological Seminary, the City University of New York, Rutgers, Tufts, University of Aberdeen, the Juilliard School, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Fordham University, San Francisco State University, University of Notre Dame, Carnegie Mellon University, and most recently Keio University are among his many academic and civic achievements.

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