Axel Springer Fellows, Bosch Fellows in Public Policy

Laura Secor

Class of Fall 2009, Class of Spring 2014

Author and Journalist

New York

Fugitives from Paradise

During her time at the Academy, Secor was completing her book Fugitives from Paradise, which builds on magazine work she published in the New Yorker from 2005 through 2012. Secor chronicles the emergence of the movement for democratic reform within the Islamic Republic of Iran. Her approach is part intellectual history, part political narrative, and part biography of a group of individuals whose lives became entwined with a political struggle within the Islamic order. The book opens with the Islamist thinkers whose ideas inspired Iran’s 1979 revolution; it traces the unlikely evolution of liberalism in extreme times; and it sets the ideas of the reformers against the fine grain of reality, from revolutionary courtrooms to city halls. The contest for Iran’s future is not new, she argues, and it is not only an elite affair. With a narrative scope both broad and deep, Secor investigates the reform movement’s roots in demographics and the history of ideas in Iran and in the West.

Laura Secor is an independent journalist who has spent nearly a decade researching and writing about Iran. Her work has appeared in the New Yorker, New York Times Magazine, Atlantic Monthly, New Republic, and other publications. She studied philosophy at Brown University, and has been a fellow at the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library (2008-2009); a staff editor of the New York Times op-ed page; a reporter for the Boston Globe; acting executive editor of the American Prospect; and a senior editor and writer for Lingua Franca. She is the author, most recently, of Children of Paradise: The Struggle for the Soul of Iran (Riverhead, 2016).