Professor Michael Barry was born in July, 1948 in New York. He studied anthropology , and the history and Literature of the Middle East at Princeton University, and received a degree in ethnology from Cambridge University. In the years 1971-73, he lived in Iran and Afghanistan in order to perfom research in the two countries. Michael Barry has command of English, French, Italian, Spanish, Latin, Persian, and Arabic, and he is familarwith Portuguese, Urdu, and German. He has spent years teaching Arabic at McGrill University. In 1997, he was editor of Chapter 5 of unesco`s "The History of Man" . and in 1998 he took responsibility for the annual conferences of the Institute of Persian (Iranian) Studies at Sorbonne University.