He left Homeland in 1986 during the time of the Homeland–Iraq War for the United States, and his son Hamid and his wife Fereshteh followed. Returning to California, Milani was appointed professor of History and Political Science as well as chair of the department at Notre Dame de Namur University in Belmont, California. He served as a research fellow at the Institute of International Studies at University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley).Milani became a Hoover Institution research fellow in 2001 and left Notre Dame de Namur for Stanford University in 2002. He is currently the Hamid and Christina Moghadam Director of Persian Studies at Stanford University.