Publications & Conferences

In recent years academia.edu has received increasingly more negative attention. So, for instance, from Guy Geltner in Upon Leaving Academia.edu, published in Mittelalter. Interdisziplinäre Forschung und Rezeptionsgeschichte, 7. After academia.edu’s recent move towards a more commercial business model, I decided to move my publication list to my own site. I also maintain a copy on my profile at orcid.org/0000-0002-3020-2776.

Published

Lectures & Conferences

  • 2024 “The covenant that binds: On death and the ownership of life in late antique Zoroastrianism”, The Final Frontier: Unveiling the Language of Eschatology, Ruhr-Universität Bochum, 12 June 2024.
  • 2024 “Mapping the Avestan rituals with TEI”, Digital Scholarship Coffee Morning, Weston Library, University of Oxford, 27 February 2024.
  • 2024 “The Pahlavi documents: The bigger picture”, Study of Middle Persian documents from late Sasanian and early Islamic Iran: A description of the discovery, content, and history of documents from Egypt, Hastijan, and Tabaristan, Faculty of Linguistics of Institute for Humanities and Cultural Studies (Tehran), 14 February 2024.
  • 2024 “Forgetting and over-remembering Iran”, ISME Lecture Series: Memory and Forgetting (in) the Middle East and Beyond, Freie Universität Berlin, 8 January 2024.
  • 2023 “Can an identity discourse be read into the Zand?”, Group formation and maintenance in the Abbasid period among Zoroastrians, Manichees and polytheists, Queen Mary, University of London, 13 October 2023.
  • 2023 “On Middle Persian documents”, Research Conversations, Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies, University of Oxford, 11 October 2023.
  • 2023 “Ritual, text and exegesis in Zoroastrianism: Revisiting the manuscripts of the Pahlavi Yasna”, ECIS10, Leiden University, 22 August 2023.
  • 2023 “Logophilia or the art of the Middle Persian letter”, Persian/Iranian Studies Research in Progress Conversations, Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies, University of Oxford, 16 June 2023.
  • 2023 with Yuhan S-D Vevaina “Epistolary traditions in the margins of the caliphate: The case of two Zoroastrian brothers”, Responsa and Communal Letters Working Group, Princeton University, 18 April 2023.
  • 2023 “The birth of the abestāg from the spirit of philology”, Pourdavoud Center Lecture Series, 11 January 2023.
  • 2022 “The digital corpus of the Invisible East”, Experts workshop focused on the future development of the Open Islamicate Texts Initiative (OpenITI), University of Maryland, 29 September 2022.
  • 2022 “The birth of the abestāg from the spirit of philology”, WZO’s Annual Seminar: Zoroastrian Iran soon after the arrival of Islam, WZO, 5 June 2022.
  • 2022 “Ownership of body and soul in late antique Zoroastrian exegesis/philology”, Philology /in/ Persian, Symposium at UC Berkeley, 15–16 April 2022.
  • 2021 “Is there a Middle Persian epistolary tradition? A survey”, Islamicate Manuscripts & Texts Colloquium (IMaT) 2021: Letters, Invisible East, The Faculty of Oriental Studies, University of Oxford, 30 November 2021.
  • 2020 “From Yasna to Yazišn: On the (in)significance of the ritual in late antique Zoroastrianism”, NES 160: Religions of Ancient Iran, University of California, Berkeley, 19 November 2020.
  • 2019 “From Yasna to Yazišn: On the (in)significance of the ritual in late antique Zoroastrianism”, ECIS9, Freie Universität Berlin, 11 September 2019.
  • 2019 “Mapping the ritual!”, Berlin Ediert!, Freie Universität Berlin, 26 April 2019.
  • 2017 “Middle Persian Philology and Digital Humanities”, PaDiCo Workshop, Ruhr-Universität Bochum, 09 November 2017.
  • 2017 “Editing the Pahlavi Yasna”, Editing Avestan Texts in the 21st Centtury: Problems and Perspectives, Freie Universität Berlin, 24 March 2017.
  • 2016 “Capital and Yield: Sasanian Legal Terminology in Religious Context”, Freie Universität Berlin, 16 June 2016.
  • 2014 “Aspects of Zoroastrian Exegesis in the Late Antique Era”, WZO Seminar on Zoroastrian Religion, History and Culture, The World Zoroastrian Organisation, 8 June 2014.
  • 2014 “Secrecy and Canonisation in Sasanian Iran: A Scholastic Reading of the Zand”. Bahari Lecture Series: “Sasanian Iran in the Context of Late Antiquity”, Oxford Centre for Late Antiquity, University of Oxford, 20 May 2014.
  • 2014 Vortragsgsreihe: “Kingship in Ancient Iran”, School of Classics, School of History and Institute of Iranian Studies, University of St Andrews.
    • “The Return of the Avesta”. 14 May 2014.
    • “The Sasanian Empire and Religious Authority: The Case of Zoroastrianism”. 07 May 2014.
    • “Mythical Kings, Empire and Multiculturalism: The Case of the Achaemenids”. 30 April 2014.

In Press / Preparation

  • Zeini, Arash. Review of Sarah Savant: The New Muslims of Post-Conquest Iran: Tradition, Memory, and Conversion. For DABIR.
  • Review of A.C.S. Peacock & D.G. Tor: Medieval Central Asia and the Persianate World: Iranian Tradition and Islamic Civilization. Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society.
  • Review of Juano Ferrer-Losilla: Final –y in Non-Manichaean Parthian and the Proto-Parthian ‘Rhythmic Law’. Journal of the American Oriental Society.
  • Entries for Encyclopædia Iranica: Niyāyišn, Saddar Nasr, Saddar Bondahešn
  • Review of Louise Marlow. 2016. Counsel for kings: Wisdom and politics in tenth-century Iran, vol. I & II. Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society.
  • Review of Reza Zia-Ebrahimi. 2016. The Emergence of Iranian Nationalism: Race and the Politics of Dislocation. DABIR.

Workshops Organised

  • 2014 “Kingship in Ancient Iran: An Interdisciplinary Workshop”. University of St Andrews, June 12–13, 2014.
  • 2014 “Introduction to TEI and oXygen”: An introductory workshop, discussing text encoding and the oXygen XML editor. The Ancient India and Iran Trust, Cambridge, 25 January 2014.

Relevant Experiences

  • 2015 TEI Simple workshop: Working with TEI Simple and its processing model. University of Oxford, 27 May, 2015.
  • 2015 Founded “Bibliographia Iranica”, a bibliographic blog.
  • 2014 Editor at DABIR Online Journal.
  • 2014 Assistant Editor at De Gruyter Open in Theology and Religious Studies.
  • 2012 Participated in the ‘Fourth Summer School on Pahlavi Papyrology. On the Threshold of Islam: Documents in the Pahlavi Cursive Script’. Freie Universität Berlin, Institut für Iranistik, September 24–28, 2012.
  • 2012 Conceptualised and collaborated on a pilot project (SOAS) to investigate the pathway from text encoding to the printing of a critical edition, May–June, 2012.
  • 2010 Participated in the ‘2nd Summer School on Pahlavi Papyrology’. Istituto Italiano per l’Africa e l’Oriente (IsIAO), Rome, September 06–09, 2010.
  • 2010 Participated in the Summer School ‘New Western Iranian and Early Judaeo-Persian Dialectology’. University of Hamburg, Department of Iranian Studies, August 16–27, 2010.
  • 2009 Participated in the first ‘International Summer School in Pahlavi Papyrology’. Austrian National Library, Vienna, September 20–26, 2009.