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Firuza Abdullaeva (University of
Cambridge)
Dr. Firuza Abdullaeva is a graduate
(BA, MA honour) of the Iranian Philology Department, Faculty of
Oriental Studies,
St Petersburg
University, where she
received her PhD in Iranian philology, Art and Islamic Studies
in 1989. She was an Associate Professor at the
University
of St Petersburg when
she joined the Cambridge Shahnama Project in 2002 after a term
at the Institute for Advanced Study (Princeton) and a term at
the University
of Michigan (Ann Arbor) as a Fulbright Professor. From
September 2005 until September 2010 she was Lecturer in Persian
Literature at the Oriental Institute,
University of Oxford and Fellow and Keeper of the Firdousi Library
of Wadham
College,
Oxford. From
October 2010 she is the Head of the Shahnama Centre,
Pembroke
College, University of Cambridge.
Her main research interests include Classical Persian
literature, Medieval Persian book art, Travelogue literature of
the Qajar period and Russian Orientalism in
Persia, Central Asia and the
Caucasus.
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Ali M Ansari (University of St Andrews)
Professor of Iranian History & Director of the Institute for
Iranian Studies at the University of St Andrews; Associate
Fellow of the Middle East Programme, Royal Institute for
International Affairs (Chatham House).
Author of: Crisis of Authority: Iran’s 2009 Presidential
Election RIIA, London, 2010; Iran Under Ahmadinejad, Adelphi
Paper, IISS, January 2008, Confronting Iran: the failure of US
policy and the roots of mistrust Hurst, London, 2006, Modern
Iran since 1921: the Pahlavis and after, 2nd Edition, Longman,
London, 2007, Iran, Islam & Democracy - The Politics of Managing
Change 2nd Edition, RIIA, London, 2006; “Iran and the US in the
shadow of 9/11: Persia and the Persian Question revisited”, in
Iranian Studies, Vol 39, No 2, June 2006, pp 155-170;
“Peacekeeping in the Middle East’ Peacekeeping ed Rachel Utley,
Ashgate, Aldershot, 2006, pp 135-146; “Persia in the Western
Imagination’ in Vanessa Martin (ed) Anglo-Iranian Relations
since 1800 Royal Asiatic Society Books, Routledge, London, 2005,
pp8-20; “Iranian Nationalism” in Youssef Choueri (ed) Companion
to the History of the Middle East Blackwell, London, 2005, pp
320-333; “Cultural Transmutations: the Dialectics of
Globalisation in Contemporary Iran”, in T Dodge & R Higgot (eds)
Globalisation and the Middle East: Economy, Society & Politics
RIIA, London, 2002; “The Myth of the White Revolution: Mohammad
Reza Shah, ‘modernisation’ and the consolidation of power”, in
Middle Eastern Studies, 37, 3, July 2001 pp 1-24; “Iranian
Foreign Policy under Khatami: Reform & Reintegration”, in Iran &
Eurasia ed A Ehteshami & A Mohammadi, Ithaca Press, Reading,
2000, pp 35-58; ‘Continuous Regime Change from within’, The
Washington Quarterly, Autumn 2003, Vol 26 number 4, pp 53-68.
Forthcoming: The Politics of Nationalism in Modern Iran, CUP,
2012
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Touraj Daryaee (UC Irvine)
Dr. Touraj Daryaee is the Howard C. Baskerville Professor in the
History of Iran and the Persianate World and the Acting Director
of the Dr. Samuel M. Jordan Center for Persian Studies and
Culture at the University of California, Irvine. Among his books
include The Oxford History of Iran, OUP, 2012; Sasanian Persia:
The Rise and Fall of an Empire, IB Tauris, 2009; Scholars &
Humanists: Iranian Studies in Henning and Taqizadeh
Correspondence 1937-1966, co-edited with Iraj Afshar, Mazda
Pub., 2009; Sasanian Iran: Portrait of a Late Antique Empire,
Mazda Pub., 2008; The Spirit of Wisdom: Essays in Memory of
Ahmad Tafazzoli, co-edited with M. Omidsalar, Mazda Pub., 2004;
Shahrestaniha-I Iranshahr: A Middle Persian Text on Late Antique
Geography, Epic and History, Mazda Pub., 2002. He is the editor
of the Name-ye Iran-e Bastan: The International Journal of
Ancient Iranian Studies and the creator of Sasanika: The Late
Antique Near East Project.
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Linda Komaroff (Los Angeles County Museum of Art)
Dr. Linda Komaroff has served as LACMA’s curator of Islamic art
since 1995. She is the author or editor of several books, and
has written numerous articles and book chapters on various
aspects of Islamic art, with a special focus on the Iranian
world. Her exhibitions at LACMA include Letters in Gold: Ottoman
Calligraphy from the Sakıp Sabancı Collection, Istanbul (1999);
The Legacy of Genghis Khan: Courtly Art and Culture in Western
Asia, 1256-1353 (2003); A Tale of Two Persian Carpets (2009);
and Gifts of the Sultan: The Arts of Giving at the Islamic
Courts (2011). The latter was the first major exhibition on
Islamic art organized by an American institution to travel to
the Middle East, to the Museum of Islamic Art, Doha (2012),
where Komaroff was the guest curator. Her next exhibition
Gardens of Eternity: Visualizing Paradise in Islamic Art is
scheduled for 2016. She is the recipient of a number of grants
for scholarly research, including two Fulbright fellowships, and
Metropolitan Museum of Art and Getty fellowships, while the
Legacy of Genghis Khan exhibition catalogue received the
prestigious Alfred H. Barr, Jr., Award from the College Art
Association and Gifts of the Sultan received the Annual
Publication Prize for Outstanding Exhibition Catalogue from the
Association of Art Museum Curators. She has taught at Hamilton
College, New York University, and UCLA. Komaroff orchestrated
LACMA’s acquisition of the Madina Collection of Islamic Art in
2002, which in combination with the museum’s already existing
collection of Islamic art, gives Los Angeles one of the most
significant collections worldwide; in 2006 she began to acquire
and exhibit contemporary art of the Middle East, placing LACMA’s
collection at the forefront of American museums.
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Mazyar Lotfalian (UC Irvine)
Dr. Mazyar Lotfalian (PhD, Anthropology, Rice University) is
currently the Assistant Director of Samuel Jordan Center for
Persian Studies and Culture at the University of California,
Irvine. He is working on a book on aesthetics and politics of
the transnational circulation of visual culture (film,
multimedia art, performance, and photography) among Iranians. He
is also interested in studies of science and technology in
non-Western settings and the role the religion, a topic he
addressed in his book, Islam, Technoscientific Identities, and
Culture of Curiosity (2004, UPA). For this work he conducted
multi-sited ethnographic research of Islamic movements in
Malaysia, Turkey, Iran, and the US. He has taught courses on
Islam, cinema, media, and science studies at University of
Pittsburgh, Yale University, The New School University, and
Emerson College, and held post-doctoral fellowship positions at
the Center for Religion and Media at NYU, and Harvard
University’s Middle East Center.
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Charles Melville (University of Cambridge)
Dr. Charles Melville is Professor of Persian History at the
University of Cambridge and a Fellow of Pembroke College. Since
1999, he has been Director of the Shahnama Project, and since
2006 he has been President of The Islamic Manuscript Association
(TIMA), both based in Cambridge. His main research interests are
in the history and historiography of Iran in the Mongol to
Safavid periods, and the illustration of Persian manuscripts.
Recent publications include edited volumes of Safavid Persia
(1996), Shahnama Studies I (2006), Shahnama Studies II (2012),
and ‘Millennium of the Shahnama of Firdausi’ (Iranian Studies,
2010, with Firuza Abdullaeva); recent books include The Persian
Book of Kings. Ibrahim Sultan’s Shahnama (2008, also with Firuza
Abdullaeva) and Epic of the Kings. The art of Ferdowsi’s
Shahnameh (2010, with Barbara Brend), together with numerous
articles on aspects of Iran’s medieval history and culture.
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Mahmoud Omidsalar (CSU Los Angeles)
Dr. Omidsalar was born in 1950, studied in Iran through high
school, came to the US in 1969. Got my BA in Economics from
Fresno State University in 1975, my MA and PhD in Iranian
Philology and Persian literature respectively in 1982 and 1984.
Taught comparative literature and Persian language and
literature for a while in various universities (UCB, UCLA,
CSULB, Indiana University at Bloomington), and ended up working
at academic libraries. I am now employed by the John F. Kennedy
Memorial Library of CSULA. I am also on the folklore editor for
the Encyclopedia Iranica, and have been serving on the Supreme
Council of the Center for the Great Islamic Encyclopedia in
Tehran. I have published 6 volumes of facsimile editions of
Persian manuscripts with Iraj Afshar. Also, two volumes of my
Persian papers have been published in Iran and two English
volumes entitled Poetics and Politics of Iran’s National Poem,
the Shahnameh (New York: Macmillan, 2011) and Iran’s Epic and
America’s Empire: A Handbook for a Generation in Limbo (Santa
Monica, CA: Afshar Publishing, 2012). There are also some 100+
articles and encyclopedia entries published here and there.
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Alka Patel (UC Irvine)
Dr. Alka Patel is the Associate Professor of Art History at the
University of California, Irvine. Her rearch has focused on
South Asia and its connections with Iran and Central Asia
including overland and Indian Ocean maritime networks. Her works
include Building Communities in Gujarat: Architecture and
Society during the Twelfth-Fourteenth Centuries (Brill 2004),
Communities and Commodities: Western India and the Indian Ocean
(guest editor, special issue of Ars Orientalis [2004/2007]), and
her current book project on the Ghurids of Afghanistan and
northern India (ca. 1150-1215). Her interests have expanded to
include mercantile mobility, networks and architectural
patronage in 18th-19th-century South Asia, as evidenced in
Indo-Muslim Cultures in Transition (co-ed. K. Leonard, Brill
2012) and her collaborative project with Karen Leonard on the
merchant communities of Hyderabad, India.
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Sonya Rhie Quintanilla (The Cleveland Museum of Art)
Sonya Quintanilla recently began her post as the George P.
Bickford Curator of Indian and Southeast Asian Art at the
Cleveland Museum of Art. For eight years she was the Curator of
Asian Art at The San Diego Museum of Art, where she was in
charge of the world-class Edwin Binney 3rd Collection of
Southern Asian paintings. She completed her B.A. in South Asian
Art and Religion at Smith College in 1993 and her Ph.D. in
Indian art history at Harvard University in 1999; in 2007 she
published her doctoral work in History of Early Stone Sculpture
at Mathura. From 2000–2004 Sonya taught South Asian art history
at the University of California at Irvine. Her scholarly
publications are on early Indian sculpture and Jainism as well
as modern paintings of India. She has curated major traveling
exhibitions, including Into India: South Asian Paintings from
The San Diego Museum of Art (2012), Dreams and Diversions:
Japanese Woodblock Prints from The San Diego Museum of Art
(2010), and Rhythms of India: The Art of Nandalal Bose (2008).
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Jennifer Rose (Claremont Graduate University)
Jenny Rose teaches Zoroastrian Studies at the School of
Religion, Claremont Graduate University. She holds a doctorate
in Ancient Iranian Studies from Columbia University, and her
dissertation was published in book form as The Image of
Zoroaster: The Persian Mage Through European Eyes (Bibliotheca
Persica Press, 2000). In 2011 Jenny published Zoroastrianism: An
Introduction (I.B. Tauris), and Zoroastrianism: A Guide for the
Perplexed, (Continuum), both of which have been favorably
reviewed in the US and abroad. Dr. Rose lectures extensively at
other academic institutions, museums, and Zoroastrian
Association events throughout North America and Europe. She also
leads study-tours of some of the most important archaeological,
cultural and devotional sites in Iran and Central Asia.
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M. Rahim Shayegan (UC Los Angeles)
Dr. M. Rahim Shayegan is Associate Professor in the Department
of Near Eastern Languages and Cultures at UCLA. He received his
Ph.D. in 2000 from Harvard University. He is also the Acting
Director of the Iranian Studies program at UCLA. His speciality
is the study of Achaemenid, Arsacid, Seleucid, and Sasanian
history with special attention to interactions between
Mesopotamia and Iran; as well as Greco-Roman and Iranian
cultural and ideological exchanges. His book include Talmud in
Its Iranian Context, co-edited with C. Bakhos, J.C.B. Mohr,
2010; Arsacids and Sasanians: Political Ideology in
Post-Hellenistic and Late Antique Persia, Cambridge, 2011; and
Aspects of History and Epic in Ancient Iran: From Gaumata to
Wahnam, Center for Hellenic Studies, 2012.
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Yuhan S-D Vevaina (Stanford University)
Yuhan Sohrab-Dinshaw Vevaina received his M.A. in 2003 and his
Ph.D. in 2007 from the Department of Near Eastern Languages and
Civilizations, Harvard University. He served as a Postdoctoral
Fellow in the Undergraduate Core Curriculum and as the Lecturer
on Old Iranian at Harvard from 2007-2009. He was a Fellow of the
National Endowment for the Humanities from the National Council
for the Humanities in 2010. He is currently a Lecturer in the
Department of Religious Studies at Stanford University. He
teaches a number of courses related to Ancient and Late Antique
Iran, including Old Persian and Middle Persian Language and
Literature; Winged Bulls and Sun Disks: Religion and Politics in
the Persian Empire; and most recently, Priests, Prophets, and
Kings: Religion and Society in Late Antique Iran. He is
currently working on a book project on Zoroastrian hermeneutics
in Late Antiquity, and he is a co-editor of the forthcoming, The
Blackwell Companion to the Study of Zoroastrianism, to be
published by Wiley-Blackwell of Oxford, U.K.
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