Bibliographia Iranica

A predominantly bibliographic blog for Iranian Studies

Category: Events

  • Center for Iranian Studies and the Encyclopædia Iranica

    Many congratulations to Professor Elton Daniel, who has been appointed the Interim Director of the Center for Iranian Studies and Editor-in-Chief of the Encyclopædia Iranica. See below for the full text of the announcement:

    It is with great pleasure that the Board of Directors of the Foundation announces the appointment of Professor Elton Daniel by Columbia University as the Interim Director of the Center for Iranian Studies and Editor-in-Chief of the Encyclopædia Iranica.

    For many years now, the Encyclopædia has consistently benefitted from Professor Daniel’s impressive contributions as an erudite scholar with a formidable knowledge of Iranian culture as well as proven qualities as an able and energetic administrator. During his tenure as Professor of History at the University of Hawaii, he served for four years as Senior Research Scholar and Associate Editor of the Encyclopædia at the Center for Iranian Studies, ensuring a steady progress in publishing well researched and edited entries. Since then, Professor Daniel has been closely involved with the progress of the project, reviewing entries before publication as well as contributing several substantial articles of his own.

    As an international enterprise, the Encyclopædia project requires exceptional leadership with a wide range of experience and close familiarity with current scholarship worldwide. In the course of his academic career, Professor Daniel has studied and taught in different continents (including in the Middle East and Iran) and has held several prestigious fellowships. As well as authoritative articles and monographs on early medieval history in which his linguistic and philological expertise in Persian, Arabic and Turkish are displayed to the full, he has written a highly acclaimed general history of Iran intended for a general readership which is now in its second edition.

    The Board welcomes Professor Daniel’s appointment and looks forward to working with him in ensuring the successful progress of the project under his leadership.

  • Achaemenian Palaces and the Zoroastrian Ritual Surfaces

    Cylinder seal impression from Daskyleion with royal audience scene, inscribed “Artaxerxes.” Drawing by B. Mussche of Daskyleion inv. no. Erg. 55. After AMI 22, 1989, p. 147, fig. 1 © Encyclopædia Iranica Online

    “The Old Iranian Absolute Frame of Reference.
    To the Orientation of Achaemenian Palaces and the Zoroastrian Ritual Surfaces“.

    A talk by Kianoosh Rezania (Bochum).

    Monday, 9 January 2016, 06:30 PM, Österreichische Orient-Gesellschaft Hammer-Purgstall Dominikanerbastei 6/6, 1010 Wien.

    This talk is the first of a talk series “Kulturwissenschaftliche Iranforschung“,  organized as joint events by the Institute of Iranian studies (IFI) at the Austrian Academy of Sciences (ÖAW) and the Österreichischen Orient-Gesellschaft Hammer-Purgstall, Vienna.

    Abstract

    For the orientation in space and the linguistic expression of spatial relations of objects, different coordination systems can be used. One of these systems utilizes fixed cardinal directions. The four compass points north, south, east and west constitute the cardinal directions of our absolute frame of reference. Did the Old Iranians employ the same frame of reference likewise with these compass points?
    After the representation of different coordination systems, absolute, intrinsic and relative, the paper addresses the Old Iranian absolute frame of reference. By means of the orientation of Achaemenian palaces, the order of countries in the Old Persian list of nations as well as Avestan linguistic evidence, it will be demonstrated that the Old Iranian people did not used our todays compass points for their orientation in space, but employed a different absolute frame of reference. The paper will present the cardinal directions of this system.

    You can download the whole program of this talk series here.

    Kianoosh Rezania is a professor of Western Asian Religious Studies at the Center for Religious Studies (CERES) of the Ruhr-Universität Bochum.

  • Multilingualism, Communication and Social Reality in Pre-Modern Eurasia

    Multilingualism, Communication and Social Reality in Pre-Modern Eurasia: Linguistic, Ritual, and Socio-Economic Aspects

    International Workshop, organized by the Institute of Iranian Studies (IFI) of the Austrian Academy of Sciences (ÖAW) and Vienna Linguistic Society and the Austrian Academy of Sciences Press

    13.12-15.12.2016, Institute of Iranian Studies, Austrian Academy of Sciences

    The Cyrus cylinder © The Trustees of the British Museum

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  • Memory and Commemoration in Islamic Central Asia

    LUCIS 7th Annual Conference: Memory and Commemoration in Islamic Central Asia

    Leiden University Centre for the Study of Islam and Society

    d1180x250The seventh annual conference of LUCIS focuses on Islamic Central Asia, both from a historical and contemporary perspective. Central Asia today is often regarded as a periphery of the Islamic world, but this region with its fluid borders, stretching into present-day Afghanistan, Russia, China, Mongolia, Iran and the Caucasus, has been for a long period the cradle of empires that ruled over large parts of the globe.

    Central Asia in the past has been at the heart of the trade network known as the Silk Road, a premodern highway of global interaction. The idea of a New Silk Road today demonstrates Central Asia’s increasing importance as a centre stage of geopolitical interests. Comprehending the complex history of Central Asia by taking into account its dynastic and regional historiographies and more recent nationalistic narratives is crucial for perceiving the current dynamics of this vast region.

    Analysing commemorative practices across Central Asia may provide a prolific framework to outline the complexity of its group identities, in modern times often constructed as nationalistic narratives. In this conference we propose to focus on the notion of memory and commemoration in Central Asia from past and present perspectives, in a broad sense, in order to shed light on the complexities of this fascinating and understudied region.

    Themes

    Rather than focusing on a single period, medium or language of commemorative practices, the conference will take a comparative and connective perspective. Questions that may be addressed include:

    • Narratives: How does literary and artistic production reflect imperial ideology and commemorative culture? How were dynastic members commemorated and rehabilitated? How were genealogies concocted and manipulated in order to commemorate the ancestral origins? How were important events commemorated?
    • Sites:  How were visions of kingship articulated in commemorative dynastic shrines and landscapes across Central Asia? How did religiously diverse commemorative practices contribute to the development of a distinct royal visual morphology? How were urban centres transformed through the diverse visual lexicon of local Islamic cult activities? How are historical shrines and cults commemorated in the present?
    • Religions:  How was commemorative culture influenced by orthodox Islam and Sufism? What was the impact of these complex theological interactions on the intellectual life and artistic production throughout Central Asia? How are religious commemorative practices used in contemporary nationalistic discourses?

    The themes of the conference are broad on purpose, as we wish to welcome speakers from different disciplines and backgrounds.

    Please find the full programme of the LUCIS annual conference here.

  • The Hidden Face of Surat

    the-hidden-suratThe Hidden Face of Surat: Exploring the History of a Cosmopolitan Centre, 1540-1750

    Sanjay Subrahmanyam, Distinguished Professor and Irving & Jean Stone Chair in Social Sciences, UCLA

    The Second JESHO Lecture on Asian History, organised by Brill Academic Publishers and Institute of Iranian Studies (Austrian Academy of Sciences)

    03.11.2016, 18:00
    Aula at the Campus (court 1.11), University of Vienna
    Spitalgasse 2, 1090 Wien

    The great port of Surat in western India dominated accounts of Indian Ocean trade between the late sixteenth and mid eighteenth century. Consolidated first by an Ottoman notable, it became the Mughal Empire’s western window into the worlds of the Red Sea and the Persian Gulf. In this lecture, I explore Surat’s other, less visible, aspect: namely as an intellectual centre, that brought together diverse and sometimes competing traditions. In turn, we shall see how this vibrant intellectual life was tied up both to certain structures of politics, and to commercial exchange at various scales.

    Programm (PDF)

    Sanjay Subrahmanyam is Professor and Irving and Jean Stone Endowed Chair in Social Sciences at UCLA. He taught at Paris from 1995 to 2002 as Directeur d’études in the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, holding a position on the economic and social history of early modern India and the Indian Ocean world. In 2002, Subrahmanyam was appointed as the first holder of the newly created Chair in Indian History and Culture at the University of Oxford, a position he held for two years before moving to a chair in UCLA. From July 2005 to June 2011, he served as founding Director of UCLA’s Center for India and South Asia. In 2013, Sanjay Subrahmanyam was elected to a Chair in Early Modern Global History at the Collège de France in Paris. He is the author of The Career and Legend of Vasco de Gama (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997); Three Ways to be Alien: Travails and Encounters in Modern Eurasia (Waltham, Mass.: Brandeis University Press, 2011; Courtly Encounters: Translating Courtliness and Violence in Early Modern Eurasia (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2012).

    Convenor
    Paolo Sartori, Institute of Iranian Studies, Editor–in-Chief of JESHO
    Hollandstrasse 11−13, 1020 Vienna
    T: +43 1 51581-6516
    paolo.sartori@oeaw.ac.at

  • The Legacy of the Ancient Kings

    The Legacy of the Ancient Kings. Ctesiphon and the Persian Sources of Islamic Art

    15.11.2016 to 02.04.2017
    Pergamonmuseum

    How did Islamic cultures and Islamic art arise? Where do their roots lie? Like the Islamic religion itself, Islamic art also built on its predecessors in the Middle East. Focussing on Ctesiphon, a vast landscape of ruins south of Baghdad, this exhibition is devoted to the Persian legacy inherited by Islam.

    Dominated by the monumental vaulted hall of the royal palace, the Taq-e Kesra, the city today is an emblem of the grandeur and downfall of the mighty Sassanid empire, a great power in ancient Persia about which little is known today. For centuries it competed with Rome and Byzantium. In the 7th century CE, however, the conquests by the Arab armies fundamentally changed the political balance of power. Culturally, too, a transformation took place – “Islamic art” was born. But had everything really changed?

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  • Symposium: The Limits of Empire in Afghanistan

    The Oriental Institute and the Franke Institute for the Humanities, University of Chicago, announce a conference to be held October 5-7, 2016.

    The Limits of Empire in Afghanistan: Rule and Resistance in the Hindu Kush, circa 600 BCE-650 CE

    In the first millennia BCE and CE, successive empires sought to incorporate the archipelago of territories in and around the Hindu Kush and to install their structures of rule. The Achaemenians, Seleucids, and Sasanians endeavored — and sometimes pretended — to rule regions of Afghanistan from their courts located in the Near Eastern core, upward of 2500 km distant. The Kushans, for their part, made Bactra and Begram the bases of an empire that extended far beyond into India and Central Asia. Apart from distance, these empires confronted a political geography in the Hindu Kush that was — like the Caucasus — uniquely unfavorable to imperial governance, as well as populations with disparate cultures, social structures, and political traditions. Afghanistan thus provides a test of the capacities of ancient imperial regimes to overcome distance, verticality, and difference to integrate territories into their trans-regional and trans-cultural orders. As even a passing familiarity with the history of the region suggests, efforts at empire failed at least as often as they succeeded in a geographical and cultural landscape highly conducive what James Scott calls the “art[s] of not being governed.” The conference aims to focus on the limits of empire in Afghanistan, as a means of better comprehending the workings of the regimes that laid claim to its territories and the responses of its populations.

    The conference convenes archaeologists, art historians, historians, philologists, and numismatists to debate current research in the context of ongoing theoretical debates concerning the formation, endurance, and limits of imperial systems within a highland political ecology.

    For a detailed programme and abstracts, see Symposium: The Limits of Empire in Afghanistan | The Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago.

  • The Christian Sogdian Gospel Lectionary E5 in Context

    bildschirmfoto-2016-09-27-um-12-08-04
    The monastery at Bulayïq, Dafusan’gaicum, Tulufan/Turpan, Xinjiang © Chiara Barbati 2015

    Lecture and Book Presentation at Tehran University

    The Christian Sogdian Gospel Lectionary E5 in Context

    Department for Iranian Studies at the University of Tehran in cooperation with The Austrian Academy of Science (ÖAW) present:

    Lecture : “The Christian Sogdian Gospel Lectionary E5 in Context”
    By: Dr. Chiara Barbati (Institute of Iranistik, Austrian Academy of Sciences)
    Date: Wednesday, 5th October, 2016
    Place: University of Tehran, Faculty of Literature, Kamal Hall (4th floor)

    On the basis of a thorough philological-linguistic study, the book aims primarily at reintegrating the complex whole of the various phenomena that have contributed to creating what in modern scholarship runs under the name of Christian Sogdian Gospel Lectionary E5, a set of manuscript fragments preserved in the Turfan Collection in Berlin. The study applies a precise methodology that puts various disciplinary approaches on the same level in order to relate and interconnect textual, material and historical-cultural aspects. Specific codicological characteristics are considered in correlation with the broader manuscript tradition to which the fragments belong. The discussion of the Gospel lectionary leads to reflections on the transmission, reception and development of a specific body of religious knowledge, namely that of the Church of the East. The exploration of linguistic phenomena takes also into consideration the processes at work in the missionary history of the Church of the East in Central Asia between Late Antiquity and the early Middle Ages in the Oasis of Turfan in present-day Xinjiang, China. The book therefore addresses Iranologists as well as students of Eastern Christianity and of manuscript cultures.

    Chiara Barbati (PhD 2009) is a senior research fellow at the Institute of Iranian studies of the Austrian Academy of Sciences (ÖAW).  She specializes in Ancient and Middle Iranian languages. Her main fields of research are Sogdian language and literature with particular regard to the Christian Sogdian texts in relation to its Syriac sources, history of eastern Christianity through primary sources (Syriac) as well as secondary sources (Sogdian, Middle Persian, New Persian), paleography and codicology of pre-Islamic Iranian manuscripts and Iranian dialectology from an historical point of view.

     

  • Minorities in Iran and Beyond in Memory of Rudolf Macúch

    Rudolf Macúch (1919-1993)
    Rudolf Macúch (1919-1993)

    Minorities and Majorities in the Middle East and Asia

    In Memory of Rudolf Macúch (1919-1993)

    The Department of Comparative Religion is honoured to invites to the conference titled “Minorities and Majorities in the Middle East and Asia” which will take place at the Faculty of Arts of Comenius University in Bratislava on the days of 14th and 15th of September. The conference is dedicated to the memory of the world-renowned scholar Professor Rudolf Macúch. The talks cover different aspects of the religions and cultures of minorities, especially in today Iran and Iraq, from Mandaeans, Christians, Yezidis, Yārsān (Ahl-e Haq) and Sufīs to Buddhists, ect.

    Organizers: Department of Comparative Religion, Comenius University in Bratislava
    Slovak Association for the Study of Religions
    Venue: Comenius University in Bratislava, Faculty of Arts, 2 Gondova St.

    Conference programme (PDF):

    Wednesday, 14th September 2016

    • Maria Macuch: “Rudolf Macuch – A Life Dedicated to the Study of Minorities”
    • Eden Naby: “Modern Assyrian Culture and Prof Rudolf Macuch”
      Mahmoud Jaafari-Dehaghi: “Professor Rudolf Macúch at the University of Tehran”
    • Jiří Gebelt: “Rudolf Macúch’s Contributions to the Mandaean Studies in the Light of Current Research”

    PANEL 1: The Mandaeans of Iran

    • Muhammad Allahdadi: “Are Mandaeans Men of the Book? A Study of the Evolution of Shi’a Jurists’ Ideas about Mandaeans As Men of the Book”
    • Mohsen Jafari: “The Mandaeans: The Lost Tribe of the Iranian Constitution”
    • Reza Yarinia: “The Mandaean Cosmological Structure and Its Manifestation in the Purity of Creatures”
    • Behnam Eskandari: “The Mandaeans’ Mythical and Religious Communications with Other Religions”

    Thursday, 15th September 2016

    PANEL 2: Diasporas

    • Martin Klapetek: “The Near Orient? The Transfer of “Otherness” to European Contexts”
    • Torsten Tschacher: “On Being a Multiple Minority: ‘Indian Muslims’ in Singapore between ‘Race’ and ‘Religion”
    • Katarína Šomodiová: “The Iraqi Christian Community in Slovakia”

    PANEL 3: Multiplied and fragmented minorities

    • Alam Saleh: “The Fragmented Middle East: Ethnicity, Nationalism, and Religion”
    • Attila Kovács: “Minority-Majority Dynamics and the Public Space in the Old City of Jerusalem: A Visual Approach”
    • Dušan Deák: “Emplacing the Saintliness: Rural Muslim Religiosity between Vaishnavas Sufis and Demons”

    PANEL 4: Minority policies

    • Luboš Bělka: “Minority Religion: The History of Russia´s Policy towards Tibetan Buddhism in Buryatia (1717-2016)”
    • Marko Jovanović: “Uyghur Separatism: A Fight for Cultural or Religious Identity?”
    • Eszter Spät: “Religion and Nation-Building among the Yezidis of Iraq”

    PANEL 5:  Minorities and Religious Dogmatics

    • Alireza Bahrami: “Exploring Islam’s View about the Men of the Book”
    • Lukáš Větrovec: “Present-Day Reflections of the Viewpoints of Ibn Taymiyya on Non-Muslim Communities”
    • Qasem Muhammadi: “Religious Minorities ‘the Self’ or ‘the Other’ in the Islamic Government as Presented in the Shi‘a School of Thought”

    PANEL 7: Religious fractions and groups

    • Seyedeh Behnaz Hosseini: “Yārsān-a religious minority in Iran”
    • Mahmoud Jafari-Dehaghi: “Buddhism in the East of Iran”
    • Abdolmajid Etesami: “Zayd Ibn Ali Ibn Husayn (a.s.) and the Imamate”
    • Matej Karásek: “Christian sannyasis and Christian ashram movement in India: minors amongst Hindus or Christians?”

    PANEL 8: Minorities and majorities in literature & writing

    • Łukasz Byrski: “Writing Systems and the Minorities”
    • Deepra Dandekar: “Popular Islamic Literature and Muslim Minoritization in India”
    • Miklós Sárközy: “Wladimir Ivanow and his memoirs about Iranian Ismailis and Gypsies”
    • Estiphan Panoussi: “Hungarian Calvinist Church in Budapest Hungary Classifications of Difficulties of Some Verbal Roots and Homonyms the the Senaya Dialect of Neo-Aramaic”

  • Conference Program | societyforiranianstudies.org

    The eleventh biennal conference of the International Society for Iranian Studies will take place in Vienna from 2 to 5 August 2016.

    For more information on the conference, see this link. And here is the conference programme.