In this newest manifestation the blog is operated by Shervin Farridnejad, Yazdan Safaee and Arash Zeini.
Shervin Farridnejad is Professor of Iranian Studies / History, Languages and Cultures of the Near East at the University of Hamburg and faculty member of the Centre for the Studies of Manuscript Cultures (CSMC) / Cluster of Excellence Understanding Written Artefacts. He received his PhD (“The language of Images: A Study on Iconographic Exegesis of the Anthropomorphic Divine Images in Zoroastrianism”, Harrassowitz 2018) in Ancient/Middle Iranian and Zoroastrian Studies from the Department of Iranian Studies, Georg-August-Universität Göttingen (Germany). His research interests include the study of pre- and early Islamic Iran, Judeo-Persian literature and Iranian Jewry as well as the Zoroastrian religion, rituals and art, particularly in the late antique Iranian/Persianate world. His current research focus lies on the Zoroastrian Literature in Late Middle and Classical New Persian. His research aims to deliver a critical study of the genesis, formation, continuity and historical background of neglected and underestimated literary genre(s) of the Zoroastrian literature in Persian and Gujarati, including a critical edition of the four Ṣad Dar(s) “Hundred Chapters” and other Persian Rivāyāt. This project seeks furthermore to establish a digital database containing all extant manuscripts of the Persian and Gujarati Zoroastrian texts spread all over the world.
Yazdan Safaee is a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Ancient History and Ancient Near Eastern Studies at Universität Innsbruck. His main research interests focus on Achaemenid culture and history. He earned his PhD at the École Pratique des Hautes Études, where he explored the role and status of Persian women as reflected in the administrative records from Persepolis. His current postdoctoral project examines the influence and role of the Royal House and the Persian elite in the borderlands of the Achaemenid Empire, with a particular focus on the institutional structures of power.
Arash Zeini‘s main research interests include ancient Iran, Zoroastrianism, particularly the late antique exegesis of the Avesta, the study of Pahlavi Documents and digital humanities. He is a Bahari Research Fellow at the Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies, University of Oxford. At the Freie Universität Berlin he taught as a faculty member various courses on the history of Iran (BA), Zoroastrianism in late antiquity and Iranian history in its (late antique) sources (MA). He recently published The Roar of Silence: A Festschrift in honour of François de Blois, a volume jointly edited with Adam Benkato. His monograph, Zoroastrian Scholasticism in Late Antiquity, contains at its core an edition of the Middle Persian translation (zand) of the Yasna Haptaŋhāiti, a liturgical text composed in the Old Iranian language of Avestan and commonly dated to the middle of the second millennium BCE. Arash’s dissertation, obtained at SOAS, received jointly with Agnès Lenepveu-Hotz the 2015 SIE award for a European Ph.D. thesis in Iranian Studies.
Arash is the founder of Bibliographia Iranica.