Supporting academic excellence and research in Persian and Iranian studies through scholarships, fellowships, and bursaries.
Abstract: The beginnings of Islamic ceramics have long been attributed to the opaque white glazed wares made in Iraq in the 9th century in response to the imported Chinese porcelain and stoneware. These Islamic glazes were known to have been opacified by tin-oxide and much work has been undertaken to characterise their development and spread. However, little has been done to explain the origins of this technology and its invention in Iraq. This thesis takes a new approach to investigating the beginnings of Islamic glazed pottery. It examines the technical aspects of early Islamic glazed wares from the 7th to 10th century AD from the Eastern Mediterranean to Central Asia. A significant number of sherds from Fustat, Aqaba,...
Read MoreZahra Talaee was awarded a scholarship for a PhD. For her thesis, The Religious Function of the Endowment Institute of Astan-e Quds Razawi in the Safavid period (1501 – 1736 AD), based on Job Documents, she is perusing sixty thousand unrevealed manuscripts in the Astan-e Quds to understand why the Shrine of Mashhad was chosen by the shah as the place for the promulgation of Shi’ism and the political methods used to achieve this.
Read MoreShahrokh Raei was awarded a scholarship for a PhD at the University of Göttingen from 2003-07. His thesis, The End of Time and the Apocalypse in Zoroastrian Texts together with a translation of the Jamaspnamag, has considerably improved understanding of Zoroastrian and comparative eschatology. In 2009, Dr Raei was appointed Assistant Professor of Iranian Studies at the University of Göttingen, Germany.
Read MoreAbstract: This thesis proposes a lexicographical approach to reading Pahlavi texts; this will provide a robust and reliable tool to solve some long-standing problems, make the editions and translations more precise and improve the quality of our understanding of the language. Some selected sections of Dēnkard 6 are scrutinized as a case study to show that it is necessary to return to the philological and lexicographical approaches to reading and translating the Pahlavi texts. Several layers of definitions and sub-definitions of each lemma in the lexica of a language like New Persian, especially in the eyes of a lexicographer, may remind a Middle Persian scholar of the necessity of a similar prospect semantic diversity of...
Read MoreAbstract In a little over a decade, Nādir Shāh (r.1736-47) ousted the last remaining Safavids, founded the Afsharid dynasty (1736-96), and became the fiercest conqueror of his time, with an empire stretching from the Caucasus to India. His image is captured in diverse representations, including the earliest extant corpus of single portraits of an Iranian ruler. Yet, they have never been studied as a phenomenon that ushered in the new genre of royal portraiture in Iran. Individual depictions of kings were virtually absent in the Safavid period (1501-1722) despite the popularity of portraiture, and kingship was represented as a ruling institution. My primary inquiry traces how, and why, the royal image was reinvented from the...
Read MoreAbstract: This dissertation aims to recognize and grasp the ups and downs of Iranian social history by examining marriage, divorce, and family patterns during the Sasanian period through the lens of Syriac and Pahlavi legal records. On the one hand, research into the Sasanian family is crucial given the changes in Iranian society’s legal and social structures after the fall of the Sasanian Empire, as the family institution played a key role in the transmission of name, social rank, and private property throughout the Sasanian era and was a pillar of Sasanian society. On the other hand, the research explains the Sasanian legal and customary traditions used to build the legal systems that came after....
Read MorePedram Khosronejad completed his PhD in 2007. He was awarded a scholarship for the final year of this doctorate at École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS) to complete his thesis, Les Lions en Pierre Sculptés chez les Bakhtiâri: Description et Significations de Sculptures Zoomorphes dans une Société Tribale du Sud-ouest de l’Iran (Stone Lion Sculptures among the Bakhtiari: Descriptions and Meanings of Zoomorphoric Sculptures in a Tribal Society of South-western Iran), supervised by Professor Thierry Zarcone, Research Director of CNRS. He was appointed the Iran Heritage Foundation Goli Rais Larizadeh Fellow for the Anthropology of Iran at the University of St Andrews in 2009 – the only such post dedicated to the anthropology of Iran in Europe...
Read MoreKiumars Alizadeh received support for his for his doctorate at the Free University of Berlin on his thesis on Courts and Courtiers in the Neo-Elamite Period
Read MoreAhmad Yengimolki received support for his for his doctorate at York University on his thesis on a Comparative study between Vank Cathedral and Cordoba Mosque-Cathedral with an intertextual approach.
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