Yarshater Lectures at SOAS

‘In the rays of light of imperial favour’: The visual arts of early fifteenth-century Timurid Herat.

Four lectures by Professor David J. Roxburgh of the Department of History of Art and Architecture and Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal Professor of Islamic Art History, Harvard University:

  • 15 January Timurid Herat: The City as a Setting for Art and Literature
  • 16 January The Timurid-Ming Embassy of 1419-22: Art after China
  • 19 January Modelling Artistic Process: The Kitābkhāna and ΄Arzadāsht
  • 20 January Baysunghur’s Books: Codifying Form and Aesthetic Value

For more information, see the series’ SOAS webpage or the poster.

Early Islamic Balkh

Early Islamic Balkh: History, landscape and material culture
16th–17th January 2015, Wolfson College, Oxford
The Balkh Art and Cultural Heritage Project (2011-2015) has been investigating the early Islamic history and archaeology of the city of Balkh, in Northern Afghanistan. Synonymous with ancient Bactra, the “Mother of Cities” continued to flourish after the coming of Islam, becoming one of the  most important urban centres of the eastern Islamic world, at the junction of India, China and Transoxiana. This conference presents the interdisciplinary research of the Project’s international collaborative team, and hosts a discussion of the state of research on Balkh in the 7th-12th centuries C.E.
For more information, see here.

Symposia Iranica’s second graduate conference on Iranian Studies

Symposia Iranica provides ‘postgraduates and early career scholars with the opportunity to present their research without the limitations of an overarching theme – as such, submissions related to any aspect of Iranian studies in the ancient through to contemporary periods within the humanities and social sciences are all welcome’.
Call for Papers | Symposia Iranica
Second Biennial Iranian Studies Conference
 
Hosted by the University of Cambridge, 8-9 April 2015
***Deadline: 15 November 2014***

Infrastructure and distribution in ancient economies

International Congress

Infrastructure and Distribution
in Ancient Economies

The Flow of Money, Goods and Services

Austrian Academy of Sciences, Vienna
28–31 October 2014

Section 3 is dedicate to ‘Ancient Iranian Economies’. For the list of participants, programme and abstracts, see the conference website.

Symposium: British Library Persian manuscripts

The British Library is holding a one-day symposium on the theme of digitisation and new research on its collection of Persian manuscripts, one of the most significant in the world in both size and importance.

British Library Persian Manuscripts: Collections and Research
British Library Conference Centre, 96 Euston Road, London NW1 2DB
Friday, 31 October 2014, 9.30-18.00

Registration:
Booking will be available from Monday 22 September from British Library Events. Tickets include a light lunch and refreshments and are priced at £15 (£10 concessions).
For more information, see here.

The visual world of Persianate culture

A promising and interesting conference hosted by the University of Edinburgh coinciding with the launch of their Masters in Persian Civilization. Congratulations to the University and all who made the conference and the Masters possible. This international conference also coincides with ‘the anniversary exhibition of Rashid al-Din’s World History in Edinburgh (1 August – 31 October 2014), [and explores] the importance of the visual in the Persian world. The conference aims to examine the historic role of visual culture in the shaping, influencing, and transforming of Persian cultures over successive centuries.

For more, see the conference website. More information on the degree is here.

Eighth European Conference of Iranian Studies

The first call for the eighth European Conference of Iranian Studies (ECIS8), St. Petersburg, 15–19.09.2015:

The President and the Board of the Societas Iranologica Europaea have the pleasure to invite you to the 8th Conference of Iranian Studies to be held in Saint Petersburg, at the State Hermitage Museum and Institute of Oriental Manuscripts, from Tuesday September 15 till Saturday September 19, 2015.

Should you decide to present a paper, please fill the pre-registration form available at the site of the conference, http://ecis8.orientalstudies.ru/ and send an abstract not exceeding half a page (1500 characters) by November 1, 2014 to the organizing committee at the following e-mail address: ecis8@yandex.ru.

Sixth International Conference on Iranian Linguistics

Abstracts are invited for the Sixth International Conference on Iranian Linguistics (ICIL6), to be held in Tbilisi / Georgia in June 2015. We expressly solicit contributions from the full range of Iranian linguistics, including formal theoretical perspectives, computational linguistics, neurolinguistics, typological and functional perspectives, as well as diachronic and areal perspectives.

Kingship in Ancient Iran

DSC02578_smallI want to express my gratitude to all who came to St Andrews for the workshop. Your presence, the excellent contributions and the stimulating discussions all made the workshop a wonderful success. Thank you.As we have seen, St Andrews is the right place for this type of workshop, and the Institute of Iranian Studies has proven this a number of times. Let’s hope we can keep up this work and turn it into a tradition. Of course, none of this would have been possible without the support of the Sattaripour Foundation, BIPS, School of History and School of Classics.