Ehsan Yarshater
Encyclopedia
Ehsan Yarshater is the founder and director of The Center for Iranian Studies, and Hagop Kevorkian Professor Emeritus of Iranian Studies at Columbia University
Columbia University
Columbia University in the City of New York is a private, Ivy League university in Manhattan, New York City. Columbia is the oldest institution of higher learning in the state of New York, the fifth oldest in the United States, and one of the country's nine Colonial Colleges founded before the...

. He was the first full-time professor of Persian at a U.S. university since World War II.

He is one of the 40 editors of the Encyclopædia Iranica
Encyclopædia Iranica
Encyclopædia Iranica is a project whose goal is to create a comprehensive and authoritative English language encyclopedia about the history, culture, and civilization of Iranian peoples from prehistory to modern times...

, with articles by 300 authors from various academic institutions. He also edited the third volume of the Cambridge History of Iran
The Cambridge History of Iran
The Cambridge history of Iran is a multi-volume survey of Iranian history published by Cambridge University Press . The seven volumes cover "the history and historical geography of the land which is present-day Iran, as well as other territories inhabited by peoples of Iranian descent, from...

, comprising the history of the Seleucid, the Parthians, and the Sassanians, and a volume entitled Persian Literature. He is also an editor of a sixteen-volume series named History of Persian Literature. He has won several International awards for scholarship, including a UNESCO
UNESCO
The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization is a specialized agency of the United Nations...

 award in 1959, and the Georgio Levi Della Vida Medal for Achievement in Islamic Studies from UCLA in 1991. Lecture series in his name have been instituted at the University of London
University of London
-20th century:Shortly after 6 Burlington Gardens was vacated, the University went through a period of rapid expansion. Bedford College, Royal Holloway and the London School of Economics all joined in 1900, Regent's Park College, which had affiliated in 1841 became an official divinity school of the...

, and the University of California, Los Angeles
University of California, Los Angeles
The University of California, Los Angeles is a public research university located in the Westwood neighborhood of Los Angeles, California, USA. It was founded in 1919 as the "Southern Branch" of the University of California and is the second oldest of the ten campuses...

, and at the Centre National de Recherche Scientifique in Paris.

Life and Career

Ehsan Yarshater studied Persian language
Persian language
Persian is an Iranian language within the Indo-Iranian branch of the Indo-European languages. It is primarily spoken in Iran, Afghanistan, Tajikistan and countries which historically came under Persian influence...

 and literature at the University of Tehran
University of Tehran
The University of Tehran , also known as Tehran University and UT, is Iran's oldest university. Located in Tehran, the university is among the most prestigious in the country, and is consistently selected as the first choice of many applicants in the annual nationwide entrance exam for top Iranian...

 and Iran philology
Philology
Philology is the study of language in written historical sources; it is a combination of literary studies, history and linguistics.Classical philology is the philology of Greek and Classical Latin...

 (Old and Middle Iranian) at the School of Oriental and African Studies
School of Oriental and African Studies
The School of Oriental and African Studies is a public research university located in London, United Kingdom and a constituent college of the University of London...

 (SOAS), University of London
University of London
-20th century:Shortly after 6 Burlington Gardens was vacated, the University went through a period of rapid expansion. Bedford College, Royal Holloway and the London School of Economics all joined in 1900, Regent's Park College, which had affiliated in 1841 became an official divinity school of the...

 with Walter Bruno Henning
Walter Bruno Henning
Walter Bruno Henning was a scholar of Middle Iranian languages and literature, especially of the corpus discovered by the Turpan expeditions of the early 20th century.-Biography:...

. His Tehran University dissertation dealt with Persian poetry under the Timurid
Timurid Dynasty
The Timurids , self-designated Gurkānī , were a Persianate, Central Asian Sunni Muslim dynasty of Turko-Mongol descent whose empire included the whole of Iran, modern Afghanistan, and modern Uzbekistan, as well as large parts of contemporary Pakistan, North India, Mesopotamia, Anatolia and the...

 Shahrukh (15th century). His University of London dissertation, elaborated and published later as A Grammar of Southern Tati Dialects (Mouton, 1969), describes a series of Tati
Tati (Iran)
Tati is a group of northwestern Iranian dialects which are closely related to the Talysh language.Some sources use the term old Azari/Azeri to refer to the Tati language which was spoken in the region before the spread of Turkic languages , and is now only spoken by different rural communities in...

 dialects spoken in the southwest of Qazvin
Qazvin
Qazvin is the largest city and capital of the Province of Qazvin in Iran. At the 2006 census, its population was 349,821, in 96,420 families....

.

He has published a number of articles on modern western Iranian dialects, notably Tati and Taleshi
Talysh language
The Talyshi language is a Northwestern Iranian language spoken in the northern regions of the Iranian provinces of Gilan and Ardabil and the southern regions of the Republic of Azerbaijan. Historically, the language and its people can be traced through the middle Iranian period back to the ancient...

, and the Jewish dialects of Persian (including Lotara'i), and on Persian mythology.

Although born into a Baha'i
Bahá'í Faith
The Bahá'í Faith is a monotheistic religion founded by Bahá'u'lláh in 19th-century Persia, emphasizing the spiritual unity of all humankind. There are an estimated five to six million Bahá'ís around the world in more than 200 countries and territories....

 family, he has had no affiliation with the religion as an adult, and has said that he himself is not a Baha'i.

Publications

  1. Theorems and Remarks* (al-Isharat wa'l-tanbihat) by Avicenna, tr. into Persian in the 13th century; annotated edition. Tehran, National Monuments Society, 1953.
  2. Five Treaties in Arabic and Persian (Panj Resala) by Ibn Sina, annotated edition. Tehran, National Monuments Society, 1953.
  3. Persian Poetry under Shah Rokh: The Second Half of the 15th Century (Sher-e parsi dar 'ahd-e Shahrokh). Tehran, the Tehran University Press, 1955.
  4. Legends of the Epic of Kings (Dastanha-ye Shahnama). Tehran: Iran-American Joint Fund Publications, 1957, 1958, 1964; 2nd ed. 1974, 1982 (awarded a UNESCO
    UNESCO
    The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization is a specialized agency of the United Nations...

     prize in 1959).
  5. Old Iranian Myths and Legends (Dastanha-ye Iran-e bastan). Tehran: Iran-American Joint Fund Publications, 1957, 1958, 1964 (Royal Award for the best book of the year, 1959).
  6. With W.B. Henning (eds.). A Locust's Leg: Studies in Honour of S.H. Taqizadeh. London, 1962.
  7. Modern Painting (Naqqashi-e novin). 2 vols. Tehran: Amir Kabir, 1965–66; 2nd printing, 1975.
  8. A Grammar of Southern Tati Dialects, Median Dialect Studies I. The Hague and Paris, Mouton and Co., 1969.
  9. Iran Faces the Seventies (ed.). New York, Praeger Publishers, 1971.
  10. With D. Bishop (eds.). Biruni Symposium. New York, Center for Iranian Studies, Columbia University, 1976.
  11. Selected Stories from the Shahnama (Bargozida-ye dastanha-ye Shahnama), Vol. I. Tehran, BTNK, 1974; reprint, Washington, D.C., Iranian Cultural Foundation, 1982.
  12. With David Bivar (eds.). Inscriptions of Eastern Mazandaran, Corpus Inscriptionem Iranicarum. London, Lund and Humphries, 1978.
  13. With Richard Ettinghausen (eds.). Highlights of Persian Art. New York, Bibliotheca Persica, 1982.
  14. Sadeq Hedayat: An Anthology (ed.). New York, Bibliotheca Persica, 1979.
  15. Cambridge History of Iran, Vol. III: Seleucid, Parthian and Sassanian Periods (ed.). Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1983.
  16. Persian Literature (ed.). New York, State University of New York Press, 1988.
  17. History of Al-Tabari: Volumes 1-40 (ed.). New York, State Univ of New York Press, 2007.

See also

  • Topics
    • Iranistics
    • Modern Iranian scientists and engineers
    • List of Iranian scientists
  • Colleagues and scholars
    • Mary Boyce
      Mary Boyce
      Nora Elisabeth Mary Boyce was a British scholar of Iranian languages, and an authority on Zoroastrianism...

    • Richard Nelson Frye
      Richard Nelson Frye
      Richard Nelson Frye is an American scholar of Iranic and Central Asian Studies, and Aga Khan Professor Emeritus of Iranian Studies at Harvard University...

    • James R. Russell
      James R. Russell
      James Robert Russell is a scholar and professor in Ancient Near Eastern, Iranian and Armenian Studies. He has published extensively in journals, and has written several books....


External links




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