Professor Milani is the Director of the Iranian Studies Program and Research Fellow and Co-Director of the Iran Democracy Project at the Hoover Institution. His expertise is in US-Iran relations as well as in Iranian cultural, political, and security issues. His courses at Stanford include "US Relations with Iran," "The Aesthetics of Dissent: The Case of Islamic Iran," "Politics in Modern Iran," and "Islam, Iran and the West."

Milani is the author of many books, including: Modernity and Its Foes in Iran (1998),The Persian Sphinx: Amir Abbas Hoveyda and the Riddle of the Iranian Revolution (Mage, 2000); Lost Wisdom: Rethinking Persian Modernity in Iran in English (2004) and Persian (2004), Eminent Persions (Syracuse, 2008), The Myth of the Great Satan, (Hoover, 2010), and - most recently - The Shah (New York, 2011).

Milani has also translated numerous books and articles into Persian and English. His articles have been published in journals, magazines, and newspapers including The Washington Quarterly, the Encyclopedia Iranica, the Hoover Digest, Iranshenasi, the Journal of the Middle East, Middle East Journal, and The New York Review of Books.