Yuhan Sohrab-Dinshaw Vevaina

Yuhan Sohrab-Dinshaw Vevaina, a Governing Body Fellow of Wolfson College, is the Bahari Associate Professor of Sasanian Studies at the Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies, currently the only such post in the world. He teaches Old and Middle Iranian languages and offers instruction in the history, religions and cultures of pre-Islamic Iran. He has taught and conducted research at Harvard University (where he received his Ph.D. in 2007), Stanford University, and the University of Toronto and was a recipient of the National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship in the United States in 2010. He is the co-editor with Michael Stausberg of The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Zoroastrianism, the largest single-volume reference work on Zoroastrianism at 700 pages (Paperback edition, 2022). Prof. Vevaina’s academic specialism is the study of Zoroastrian hermeneutics or theories of interpretation in the Sasanian and early Islamic centuries. In 2021 he completed a long-awaited two-volume book project on the ninth book of the Dēnkard, the largest surviving Pahlavi (Zoroastrian Middle Persian) text. While his primary research focuses on early Iranian textual traditions and hermeneutical practices in Late Antiquity, he has a keen interest in questions of Orientalism, boundary maintenance, and the Insider/Outsider problem in the study of religion.