Editors

Founding Editor: Ehsan Yarshater (1920-2018)

Ehsan YarshaterProfessor Ehsan Yarshater was the Hagop Kevorkian Professor Emeritus of Iranian Studies at Columbia University and Director of its Center for Iranian Studies. He authored and served as the editor of numerous scholarly works. Among many notable works, he authored Persian Poetry in the Second Half of the 15th Century (1953), Southern Tati Dialects (1970), and edited the third volume of Cambridge History of Iran, in two parts, covering the Seleucid, Parthian and Sasanian periods (1983, 1986), and Persian Literature (1988). He was the General Editor of the 40-volume Tabari Translation Project, and the Founding Editor of the Persian Text Series, the Persian Heritage Series and the Persian Studies Series. Lecture series in his name have been instituted at Harvard, the University of London, and the University of California at Los Angeles.

Since the inception of the Encyclopædia Iranica, along with Professor Yarshater and for more than three decades, many editors have contributed to the volumes of Encyclopædia Iranica. Below is a non-exhaustive list:

Managing Editor: Ahmad Ashraf

Ahmad AshrafAhmad Ashraf has taught sociology and the social history of Persia at the University of Pennsylvania, Columbia University, Princeton University, and Tehran University. He is the author of several books and numerous articles, including Historical Obstacles to the Development of Capitalism in Iran (1980). His writings have covered such topics as social hierarchies in Persia, tradition and modernity, Iranian national identity, agrarian relations in Persia, and charismatic leadership and theocratic rule in post-revolutionary Persia. Dr. Ashraf served on the editorial board of the Iranian Studies, International Journal of Politics, Culture, and Society, and Iran-Nameh. Since 1992, he has served as a Trustee-at-Large of the American Institute of Iranian Studies.

Associate Editor: Nicholas Sims-Williams

Nicholas Sims-WilliamsNicholas Sims-Williams is currently Professor of Iranian and Central Asian Studies at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. He studied Iranian languages and Sanskrit at Cambridge University and went on to do a Ph.D. there under Dr. Ilya Gershevitch, his thesis being an edition of a fragmentary manuscript containing Christian texts translated from Syriac into Sogdian, the Iranian language of medieval Samarkand. This was later published as The Christian Sogdian manuscript C2, Berlin 1985, and awarded the Prix Ghirshman of the Institut de France. Professor Sims-Williams was elected a Fellow of the British Academy in 1988 and is also a member of the French and Austrian Academies. He is particularly interested in the Middle Iranian languages of pre-Islamic Iran, Afghanistan and Central Asia, being equally fascinated by the languages themselves, with their Indo-European roots, and by their Central Asian setting, with its stimulating mixture of languages, cultures, and religions.

Associate Editor: Mahnaz Moazami

Dr. Mahnaz Moazami is a graduate of the Universities of Tehran and Paris-Sorbonne, where she studied Old and Middle Iranian languages, and historical anthropology of ancient religions. She has held post-doctoral research fellowships at Harvard and Yale, and since 2008 has taught courses as a Visiting Professor at the Bernard Revel Graduate School of Jewish Studies of Yeshiva University. She is also Adjunct Assistant Professor of Religion at Columbia’s Department of Religion. Her research focuses on religion in pre-Islamic Iran, and has published several articles on different aspects of Zoroastrianism. Her publications include her book HYPERLINK "Wrestling with the Demons of the Pahlavi Widēwdād, a major source for the understanding of Zoroastrian purification laws, published by Brill in 2014. She is also the editor of Zoroastrianism: A Collection of Articles from the Encyclopædia Iranica, two-volume set, New York, NY: Encyclopædia Iranica Foundation, 2016.

Associate Editor: Mohsen Ashtiany

Mohsen AshtianyA graduate of University of St. Andrews and Oxford University, Mohsen Ashtiany has taught Persian literature and history at Oxford University, University of Manchester and the University of California at Los Angeles and has held Visiting Fellowships at Harvard and Princeton. He is a member of the Editorial Board of A History of Persian Literature (in 18 volumes); co-editor of vol. II of the series and editor of vol. III. He is also a Fellow of the Stockholm Collegium of World Literary History, Stockholm University and author of the contributions on Classical Persian Poetry in the 4 volume Literature: A World History, ed. David Damrosch et al. (Blackwell’s, 2013). An annotated translation of Beyhaqi’ Tarikh-e Mas’udi, carried out in collaboration with Professor C. E. Bosworth and funded by The National Endowment for Humanities was published in 3 volumes in September 2011 by the Ilex Foundation and the Center Hellenic Studies, and distributed by Harvard University Press.

Associate Editor: Christopher J. Brunner

Christopher J. BrunnerChristopher J. Brunner (B.A., University of Michigan, 1966; Ph.D., University of Pennsylvania, 1971) taught pre-Islamic Iranian languages and religions at Columbia University in the 1970s and was the original Assistant Editor of Encyclopædia Iranica. His dissertation, A Syntax of Western Middle Iranian, was published in the Persian Studies Series of the Center for Iranian Studies (1977), and his Sasanian Stamp Seals in the Metropolitan Museum of Art was published by the Museum (1978). His journal articles and Encyclopædia Iranica entries deal with Sasanian seals, texts, and other pre-Islamic topics. Dr. Brunner is a retired director of computer applications development, with experience in Japanese language and literature.

Senior Assistant Editor: Manouchehr Kasheff

Manouchehr KasheffA distinguished instructor of Persian, Mr. Manouchehr Kasheff taught at Columbia University from 1974 up to his retirement in 2008 and at New York University afterwards. He founded the American Association of Teachers of Persian and served as its first secretary-treasurer. He is author of a number of articles for the Encyclopædia Iranica and the Encyclopædia of Asian Studies and has translated into Persian books by A.J. Arberry and S. Runciman and articles by distinguished authors including T.S. Eliot, George Santayana, and others.

Senior Assistant Editor: Habib Borjian

Habib BorjianHabib Borjian received his academic training in the fields of engineering and humanities and has taught and published in both fields. He took graduate courses on Middle East and Central Asia at Columbia University while completing his postgraduate work in solid mechanics. He continued his study of Iranian languages at the University of Tehran and Yerevan State University, where he earned masters and doctorate degrees, respectively. His publications include articles in various journals and edited volumes and three volumes in Persian: Orthography of Iranian Languages, Tabari Texts, and Median Dialects of Isfahan.