Fereydun Adamiyat, a prominent Iranian historian, died on 29 March 2008 in Tehran. He was born in Tehran on 23 August 1920 into a family that gained some prominence during the waning decades of the Qajar dynasty, which had ruled Iran since 1786. His father, Abbas-Qoli Khan Qazvini (d. 1939), who remained a source of inspiration for his son, was a civil servant and political activist. He had in the 1880s founded an influential political society, comprised of leading political figures, which sought to promote liberal ideas.
Adamiyat received his BA in 1942 from the School of Law and Political Science, Tehran University. His undergraduate thesis—reflecting, albeit implicitly, the imprint of the Allied occupation—would become the basis of his first, and perhaps most famous book, on the mid-nineteenth century reformist chief minister, Mirza Taqi Khan Amir Kabir. Adamiyat had joined the Iranian Foreign Ministry in 1940 while still an undergraduate, and was working as a secretary at the Iranian embassy in London when, in 1946, he enrolled at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE). He completed his doctorate in 1949.
(From: Website of Cambridge university)
