Election 2020

Garnik Asatrian

Garnik S. Asatrian was born on the 7th of March 1953 in Tehran. His family repatriated to Armenia in 1967, where he graduated (1976) from the Faculty of Oriental Studies (Department of Kurdology), Yerevan State University. From 1976 to 1980 he was a Doctoral Student at the Leningrad (Saint Petersburg) Branch of the Institute of Oriental Studies, USSR Academy of Sciences, St. Petersburg. In this period, he studied Pre-Islamic Iranian languages, culture and history, predominantly having focused on Middle Iranian texts (Middle Persian, Parthian, Sogdian), under the guidance of such prominent scholars as Prof. Anahit Perikhanian, Prof. Vladimir Livshits, Prof. Igor Dyakonov, Prof. Mohammad Dandamaev and others. From 1980 to 1983 he was a Postdoctoral Researcher at the same Institute.
His PhD dissertation on “Verbal Nouns in Middle Iranian” was defended at the Oriental Faculty of St. Petersburg State University (1984), and the habilitation dissertation on “Armenian and New Iranian Languages (Kurdish, Zaza, Classical Persian)”, at the Institute of Linguistics, Russian Academy of Sciences, Moscow (1991). After returning to Yerevan he was the Head of the Dept. of Oriental Philology, Institute of Oriental Studies, Armenian National Academy of Sciences (1984-1989) and simultaneously taught at the Faculty of Oriental Studies, Yerevan State University, where he later headed the Department of Iranian Studies (till 2014). Since 2015, he is Director of the Institute of Oriental Studies, Russian-Armenian (State) University (RAU), Yerevan.
Garnik Asatrian founded several academic periodicals on Oriental Studies, including “Acta Kurdica: International Journal of Kurdish & Iranian Studies” (Curzon Press: London, 1994) and the multidisciplinary journal “Iran and the Caucasus” (Brill: Leiden-Boston), the academic annual “Caucaso-Caspica: Transactions of the Institute of Oriental Studies, RAU” (2015), as well as the monograph series “Yerevan Oriental Series” (2010). Among Asatrian’s other initiatives are the foundation of the Caucasian Centre for Iranian Studies, Yerevan (1996) and Institute of the Autochthonous Peoples of the Caucasian-Caspian region, Yerevan (2014).
His main research interests cover Iranian Comparative Linguistics, Iranian Dialectology, Iranian Etymology, Kurdology, Middle Iranian Texts, Iranian Folk Culture, Religions, Ethnic History, Armeno-Iranica, ethno-political and ethno-demographical regional developments, etc. He is the author of numerous works on the ethnic history, language and culture of the Kurds, Bakhtiaries, Lurs, Zorosatrians of Yazd, Talishis, Yezidis, etc., as well as on Persian Etymology and Iranian historical linguistics, Armeno-Iranica, etc.

Sussan Babaie

I am an historian of art and architecture and a professor at The Courtauld, University of London. My research has been supported by The Getty, The Fulbright and the National Endowment for the Humanities. I began my research (PhD 1994, Institute of Fine Arts, NYU), on the early modern period especially the Persianate-Islamicate world and have expanded its range to include a variety of topics on architecture, urbanism and urbanity. My publications on the early modern period include Isfahan and its Palaces, 2008, paperback 2018; Slaves of the Shah: New Elites of Safavid Iran, 2004; paperback 2017, Persian Kingship and Architecture, 2015, and numerous scholarly articles. My interest in transcultural conditions of artistic production have led to such publications as The Mercantile Effect: On Art and Exchange in the Islamicate World, 2017, ‘The Delhi Loot and the Exotics of Empire’, in Crisis, Collapse, Militarism and Civil War – The History and Historiography of 18th Century Iran, 2018, and ‘Missionary effects and messianic aspirations at the court of Shah ‘Abbas’ in Toward a Global Middle Ages – Encountering the World through Illuminated Manuscripts, 2019. Currently, I am working on the transmission of sensory experiences between the visual and the gustatory with the first installation of this research ‘Cookery and urbanity in early modern Isfahan’, in the Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies, 2018. I come from a graphic design background (BA 1979, University of Tehran) and am interested in exploring the interdependence between deep history of art and contemporary artistic practices of Iran and the Middle East. My publications in this field include ‘Voices of Authority: Locating the ‘modern’ in ‘Islamic’ Arts’, Getty Research Journal (2011); Shirin Neshat (2013); Honar: The Afkhami Collection of Modern and Contemporary Iranian Art (2017); and on Slavs and Tatars (2017) among others.
I have served on the Boards of Association for Iranian Studies, Association for the Study of Persianate Societies, as the President of the Historians of Islamic Art Association and am currently on the editorial boards of the Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians and the Journal of the Architectural Historians of Great Britain.

Beatrice F. Manz

Beatrice Forbes Manz is Professor of History at Tufts University.  She has published two books, The Rise and Rule of Tamerlane (Cambridge University Press, 1989) and Power, Politics and Religion in Timurid Iran (Cambridge University Press, 2007), along with numerous articles on ideology, historiography and political practice in the Mongol and Timurid periods. Her third book, Nomads in the Middle East, is forthcoming at Cambridge University Press. The next research project planned is a study of the Mongol conquest of Iran. She is currently on the editorial board of the Journal of Persianate Studies, Vice-President of the American Research Institute in Turkey, and on the board of the American Institute of Iranian Studies as past President.

Gabrielle van den Berg

Gabrielle van den Berg (PhD 1997) is Professor in the Cultural History of Iran and Central Asia at Leiden University and Principal Investigator in the NWO VICI project Turks, Texts and Territory: Cultural Production and Imperial Ideology in Central Eurasia. She studied Persian language and culture at Leiden University, The Netherlands and at the University of Dushanbe, Tajikistan. She has held positions in Leiden, Cambridge and Brussels. Her research interests include Persian literature and the history of Iran and Central Asia; she has published in particular on the oral traditions of the Ismailis of Tajik Badakhshan and the Shahnama manuscript tradition.

Research interests
Classical Persian literature, in particular the Shahnama and the Persian epic tradition, iconography in relation to literature, rhetoric and aspects of form and performance of classical Persian poetry in contemporary contexts; see also ‘The Persian Epic Cycle and the Shahnama of Ferdowsi’.
History of Central Asia and Iran, in particular the Turko-Persian world 1000-1600; see also ‘Turks, Texts and Territory. Imperial Ideology and Cultural Production in Central Eurasia’ and the Leiden Central Asia Initiative
Persian manuscript tradition, see also LUCIS Summer School Philology and Manuscripts from the Muslim World
Oral traditions of Tajik Badakhshan, Pamir languages (Shughni-Rushani) and Tajik literature of the 20^th century, see e.g. With our own hands, on food culture in the Pamir Mountains and Memory and Commemoration in Central Asia, on the Ismailis of Tajik Badakhshan

Evrim Binbaş

Evrim Binbaş received his PhD degree from the University of Chicago. After seven years at Royal Holloway, University of London, he moved to the Institute of Oriental and Asian Studies at the University of Bonn. He studies early modern Islamic history with a particular focus on the Timurid and Turkmen dynasties in the fifteenth century. His first book on the Timurid historian Sharaf al-Din ‘Ali Yazdi (d. 1454) was published by Cambridge University Press (Intellectual Networks in Timurid Iran: Sharaf al-Dīn ‘Alī Yazdī and the Islamicate Republic of Letters). Intellectual Networks in Timurid Iran shared the 2017 British-Kuwait Friendship Society Prize in Middle Eastern Studies and the 2018 Association for Iranian Studies Said Sirjani Book Prize Honorable Mention Award. It was also shortlisted for the 2017 Gladstone Prize by the Royal Historical Society in Britain, and for the 2017-2018 Book of the Year Award in Iranian Studies by the National Library and Archives of the Islamic Republic of Iran. Currently Evrim is working on three different book projects. Together with John E. Woods of the University of Chicago, he is preparing a critical edition of Yazdi’s Zayl-i Zafarnama, which is the second and so-far unpublished volume of the Zafarnama. He is also editing, again together with John E. Woods, a handbook on the Timurid dynasty titled The Timurid Dynasty: A Handbook. This book was commissioned by Brill in Leiden, and when it is published, it will include contributions from more than thirty scholars working on early modern Islamic history. Finally, he is preparing a monograph on the modalities of sovereignty in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.

Khodadad Rezakhani

Khodadad Rezakhani is a historian of late antique/early medieval Iran, specializing in the period of transition between the Sasanian and early Islamic empires. He is the author of ReOrienting the Sasanians: East Iran in Late Antiquity (Edinburgh University Press, 2017) and co-editor (with John Hyland) of the forthcoming volume, War in Ancient Iran (Brill, 2021). He is presently an Associate Researcher at Princeton University’s Sharmin and Bijan Mossavar Rahmani Center for Iran and Persian Gulf Studies.