I am a Bahari Research Fellow at the Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies, University of Oxford. My main research interests include the study of ancient Iran, Zoroastrianism, particularly the late antique exegesis of the Avesta, and digital humanities. I used to teach a variety of courses at the Freie Universität Berlin which you can find on my former university profile.
My book, Zoroastrian Scholasticism in Late Antiquity (2020), contains at its core an edition of the Pahlavi translation (Zand) of the Yasna Haptaŋhāiti, a liturgical text composed in the Old Iranian language of Avestan and commonly dated to the middle of the second millennium BCE. Contrary to commonly accepted editorial practices of my discipline, I make no attempts to critically reconstruct one version of the text. Much like a diplomatic or a non-eclectic edition the text of the presented edition is based for the first time on one manuscript while the apparatus records variants as in a variorum edition.
I examine the Pahlavi Yasna Haptaŋhāiti as a text in its own right within the wider Pahlavi literature, challenging the view that considers the study of the Zand an auxiliary science to Avestan studies. Thus, as a first, I consider the so-called glosses within the Zand as an integral part of the text. In a broad investigation of the MP literature I argue that Zoroastrian exegesis shares the common traits of Cabezón’s decontextualized scholasticism, a cross-cultural category abstracted from the Medieval European scholasticism. It is also proposed that the ritual fire’s development in Zoroastrian texts from their oldest layers through to the MP literature exemplifies correlative structures, which often emerge in manuscript traditions.
I obtained my MA and PhD at SOAS in Study of Religions. Jointly with Agnès Lenepveu-Hotz, my dissertation received the 2015 SIE award for an outstanding European Ph.D. thesis in Iranian Studies.
I have previously encoded D. MacKenzie’s ‘Concise Pahlavi Dictionary’ according to the guidelines of the ‘Text Encoding Initiative’ (TEI) and have recently developed and applied an encoding scheme for the encoding of a sample passage of the Avestan Yasna according to TEI for a pilot project at SOAS.
For my publications, see here or my orcid.org page. For social media, I will continue on Bluesky or Mastodon.