Zoroastrian Conversations’ is envisioned to be a Charlie Rose-style interview show that would feature Yuhan Sohrab-Dinshaw Vevaina (Bahari Associate Professor of Sasanian Studies and Fellow of Wolfson College at the University of Oxford) interviewing academics from around the world working on Zoroastrian and Parsi Studies, the history, languages, and cultures of early Iran and cognate disciplines.
The interviews would be conducted on Zoom and moderated by FEZANA and would serve the function of introducing the global Zoroastrian communities to the most respected and up-and-coming scholars working in these fields.
These ‘Zoroastrian Conversations’ would also serve as a forum for community members to learn about the research and teaching being undertaken by professional academics and would serve the purpose of both public engagement and education.
The central premise would be an informal chat, perhaps every two months, where the scholar chatting with Prof. Vevaina could tell us a bit about their background, entrance into the field, their research interests, things they find fascinating about Zoroastrianism and Zoroastrian communities and their wish lists for what projects they would like to undertake in the future.
It is hope that the two new hires in North America at the University of Toronto and UC Irvine would agree to participate and such a forum would allow Zoroastrians the world over to listen to and learn from our newest professors and many other speakers from all over the world in the months to come.
Zoroastrian Conversation S01 E04
Mariano Errichiello is a scholar of Zoroastrianism with an interest in history, texts, and communities of the modern period. He did his PhD at SOAS, University of London on the social history of Zoroastrianism in modern India. He has presented his research in international conferences in Asia, Europe, and the US earning two Honourable mentions by the Ancient India & Iran Trust (AIIT) and the Early Career Prize by the Association for the Study of Persianate Societies and the Journal of Persianate Studies. Mariano has been a Resident Fellow of the Centre for Comparative Studies of Civilisations and Spiritualities at Fondazione Giorgio Cini in Venice, and a Research Fellow of the Nordic Institute of Asian Studies at the University of Copenhagen. In 2022, he joined the Centre for Advanced Studies in the Humanities and Social Sciences of the Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg in Germany as a Postdoctoral Fellow. His recent work focused on Parsi studies, esotericism, and ritual performance. In September 2023, he was appointed as the Shapoorji Pallonji Lecturer of Zoroastrianism, Co-Chair and Executive Director of the Shapoorji Pallonji Institute of Zoroastrian Studies at SOAS.
Zoroastrian Conversation S01 E03
On the third episode Prof. Vevaina welcomes Dr. Céline Redard, Lecturer for the Institute of History of Religions at the University of Strasbourg, France.
Dr. Céline Redard is a Lecturer for the Institute of History of Religions at the University of Strasbourg, France. She obtained her PhD from the École Pratique des Hautes Études in Paris in 2010 with her doctoral thesis being an edition, translation, and commentary on Vidēvdād 19. Subsequently, she was a Research Assistant at the Collège de France in Paris from 2008 to 2014 and was awarded a Marie Curie Fellowship at the University of Liège in Belgium from 2014 to 2016. From 2017 to 2022, she was a Postdoctoral Researcher attached to the Multimedia Yasna (MuYa) Project funded by the European Research Council and directed by Prof. Almut Hintze at SOAS (London). Dr. Redard is currently carrying out her research on the Gujarati ritual directions in the Avestan manuscripts with the aim of studying the transmission of rituals in India from the 16th century until today.
Zoroastrian Conversation S01 E02
On the second episode Prof. Vevaina welcomes Professor Carlo G. Cereti, the Ferdowsi Presidential Chair in Zoroastrian Studies at University of California at Irvine’s School of Humanities.
Zoroastrian Conversation S01 E01
On the first episode Prof. Vevaina welcomes Professor Miguel Ángel Andrés-Toledo, The FEZANA Professor of Zoroastrian Studies, Language and Literature at the Department of Near and Middle Eastern Civilizations University of Toronto
