Dr. Evangelos Venetis was born in 1977 in Athens, Greece. He was coordinator of the Middle East Research Project of the Hellenic Foundation for European and Foreign Policy (ELIAMEP) and he is an expert in Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies at the Centre for Eastern Studies, Panteion University of Social and Political Sciences. He studied history (1999) and received his Masters Degree in the same field from the University of Ioannina (2001). He completed his PhD in Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Edinburgh, UK (2006). He taught as a lecturer Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies at the Department of Arabic, Persian and Turkish at the University of Leiden, the Netherlands. His research interests lie in the Islamic world, Shiite Islam, the Iranian world and the Greek diaspora in the Middle East. He has authored books and articles on various aspects of the Middle East in the modern and medieval period, including the forthcoming monograph Greeks in Modern Iran (19th-21st century) (Athens, 2013) and the forthcoming Shiite Islam, Doctrine, Cult and History.