Institute for Iranian Studies

Call for Participants for our Summer Academy, 17-30 August 2026, to be held in Khorog, Tajikistan! This year's focus will be cultural heritage in Central Asia. Please do share widely with those who may be interested in coming!

Plaintext version for screen readers:
https://oeawiranistik.at/plaintexts/SummerAcademy_2026.html

Call for Papers!

Chinggis Khan and the Mongol Transformation of Eurasia
14–17 July 2027, Vienna

The IFI, the Cluster of Excellence “Eurasian Transformations”,
the Chinggis Khaan National Museum, the Mongolian Academy of Sciences, and the NoMansLand Project invite proposals for this international conference. We draw on a range of disciplines to examine Chinggisid Mongol studies and interrogate new directions for the field. Cross-disciplinary, cross-regional, and methodologically innovative presentations are particularly encouraged.

Themes of interest include, but are not limited to, sources on the Mongol Empire, gender, status, and identity, structures, settlements, and cities, science and the transmission of knowledge, peripheries and frontiers, dynamics of succession, and foreign affairs.

Abstracts of up to 200 words and 2-page CV in .pdf or .docx format should be sent to Bruno De Nicola and Stefan Kamola at [email protected] by 31 May 2026. We will provide four nights’ accommodation to all accepted speakers. To request a travel bursary, please indicate this in the body of your submission email.

Please share widely with interested colleagues :)

In our 14-16 April workshop on Reza Shah's Iran, we have a program update: the keynote slot will now take the form of a roundtable, entitled "The Pahlavi Dynasty: A conversation on the history and legacy of a contested period in modern Iranian history"!

Our guests will be:
Houchang CHEHABI (Boston University)
Firoozeh KASHANI-SABET (University of Pennsylvania)
Lior STERNFELD (Pennsylvania State University)
Host: Robert STEELE (IFI)

14 April 2026, 6:00 pm
ÖAW Theatersaal, Sonnenfelsgasse 19, 1010 Wien

Details at:
https://www.oeaw.ac.at/ifi/veranstaltungen/event-details/iran-under-reza-shah-politics-culture-and-state-building-in-the-early-pahlavi-period-1925-1941

Upcoming event! On April 16th at 5pm, we will have a talk by Fatema Soudavar Farmanfarmaian about her book Scent, Colour and Glitter in the Ancient World.

While aromatics, cosmetics and adornment are often seen as frivolities, this book explores their major role in the cradles of civilisation from the Nile to the Indus between the neolithic and late Antiquity. On the way, the author explores their links to faith, power, cosmology, sexuality, magic, technology, administration and craftsmanship, many of the underpinnings of the societies that developed throughout that period.

https://www.oeaw.ac.at/en/ifi/veranstaltungen/event-details/fatema-soudavar-farmanfarmaian-scent-colour-and-glitter-in-the-ancient-world

Book link:
https://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/scent-colour-and-glitter-in-the-ancient-world-9780755656820/

Next forthcoming event! We will be hosting the conference "Iran under Reza Shah: Politics, Culture and State Building in the Early Pahlavi Period (1925-1941)".

At a critical moment for understanding modern Iranian history, and marking the hundredth anniversary of the Reza Shah taking power, we come together to re-examine the early Pahlavi period. In particular, we seek to understand the period on its own terms, without teleologically pointing towards 1979.

This event will run 14-16 April, and will include a keynote by Prof. Abbas Milani on Reza Shah and Historical Revisionism. You can find location and other details at the below link: we hope to see as many of you as possible there.

https://www.oeaw.ac.at/ifi/veranstaltungen/event-details/iran-under-reza-shah-politics-culture-and-state-building-in-the-early-pahlavi-period-1925-1941

Congratulations to our institute director, Prof. Florian Schwarz, who has been elected as a full member of the Austrian Academy of Sciences!

As distinct from those of us employed by the Academy, a full membership of the ÖAW is one of Austria's highest academic distinctions and entails an active role in collaborating and shaping the future of the Academy and of Austrian academia. It is a significant new recognition both of Florian's own academic impact, and of his leadership for our institute as a whole and the strong, high-quality research environment we are building together.

We mark this Nowruz in a time when understandably many of us and our colleagues around the world are feeling considerable fear, uncertainty, and grief. We send our best wishes at this time to all those in our shared endeavour of understanding the cultures, histories, and languages of the Iranian world, and all those across the wider region, who are in danger, or afraid for friends and loved ones.

It may be less celebratory, but perhaps more important, then, that today we should mark the new day and the coming of another year: and that we should remember that spring will come, always.

Mongols from the West, co-edited by the IFI's Dr. Bruno de Nicola, has now been published with its Spanish translation, Mongoles en el Oeste!

Mongoles en el Oeste explora el papel de los reinos ibéricos en la integración euroasiática impulsada por el Imperio mongol en los siglos XIII y XIV. A través de estudios rigurosos y basados en fuentes documentales, el volumen propone una reflexión crítica sobre la expansión europea medieval y sus vínculos con procesos globales. Al conectar la historia peninsular con la historiografía del mundo mongol, esta obra invita a repensar los orígenes de la globalización desde una perspectiva intercontinental que pone en diálogo a Europa, Asia y el mundo islámico.

https://brill.com/display/title/73324

Religious Communities and Manuscript Cultures on the Medieval Silk Road LECTURE SERIES, Vienna / hybrid event ⭐️⭐️⭐️

This Friday, 28th November, we will be having a talk by Fabian Sarga of the Free University of Berlin, who will be talking about how qanat irrigation systems shaped the landscape - and how the landscape shaped them - in Iran!

This talk uses the C16-C21st qanats of the Varamin plain as a case study: combining source reading and aerial remote sensing data, we can trace these systems and look at their ecological, social and political impacts.

The talk will be at 4pm CET, online. Register here:
https://univienna.zoom.us/meeting/register/Hx_9j8vBRGSMPj3JEVKorw #/registration