Xiyue Wang is currently a Ph.D. Candidate in History at Princeton University and a Jeane Kirkpatrick Fellow at American Enterprise Institute. He was arrested by Iran’s Ministry of Intelligence in August 2016 during his dissertation research trip in Tehran. His interrogator told him that he was detained because he is an American, and the Iranian government wanted to use him as a pawn for making a deal with the US government in order to repatriate Iranian prisoners held in the US and Iranian funds seized by US authorities. He was subsequently convicted by Iran’s Revolutionary Court for espionage and sentenced to 10 years of imprisonment without evidence and proper legal representation. Mr. Wang spent forty months in the Evin Prison until he was released through an Iran-US prisoner swap in December 2019.

Xiyue Wang