Touraj Daryaee Appointed Director of Samuel Jordan Center for Persian Studies and Culture

29 Jun 2015

Touraj Daryaee Appointed Director of Samuel Jordan Center for Persian Studies and Culture

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Founded in 2009, the Dr. Samuel M. Jordan Center for Persian Studies and Culture is a hub for interdisciplinary research projects that bridge the arts, humanities, engineering, medicine, and the sciences with Persian studies

The Samuel Jordan Center for Persian Studies and Culture, UCI’s hub for interdisciplinary research projects that bridge the arts, humanities, engineering, medicine, and the sciences with Persian studies, announced today that Touraj Daryaee, Maseeh Chair in Persian Studies and Culture, has been named director. Nasrin Rahimieh, Howard C. Baskerville Professor of Humanities, who served as the center’s founding director from July 2006 to June 2014 will continue her role as affiliated faculty directly associated with the Samuel Jordan Center for Persian Studies and Culture. Daryaee has been the acting director of the center since fall 2014.

Touraj Daryaee joined UCI in 2007 as one of three Maseeh endowed chair positions. Nasrin Rahimieh and Hossein Omoumi, Maseeh Professor of Performing Arts within the Music Department of the Claire Trevor School of the Arts, are the other two faculty members associated with the Jordan Center and supported by the generous endowment provided by its founder, Dr. Fariborz Maseeh and the Massiah Foundation.

“Touraj has been fundamental in creating scholarship, research and partnerships that bridge Iranian studies with the rest of the university and the Orange County community,” said Georges Van Den Abbeele, dean of the School of Humanities. “We believe the center will thrive under his leadership.”

Daryaee’s research focuses predominantly on the history of ancient Iran, the history of Zoroastrianism and Old and Middle Iranian languages. He has authored over ten books on those subjects. His book Sasanian Persia: The Rise and Fall of an Empire (I. B. Tauris, 2009) won the BRISMES Award with the judges calling it, “a masterpiece” and remarking that it, “offers a timely counterpart to Eurocentricity which has distorted the study of antiquity.” His recently-edited The Oxford Handbook of Iranian History (Oxford University Press, 2012) was chosen as one of the top 25 academic books of the year by CHOICE. The book was hailed as, “the best single volume on the history of the Iranian world.” Last year, Daryaee was the Bahari Senior Visiting Fellow at Oxford University for the Trinity term where he inaugurated a chair in Sasanian Studies.

“I am very glad to be given the opportunity to make Persian Studies excel at UC Irvine and to make the Jordan Center one of the top research institutions in the world,” said Touraj Daryaee.

The Dr. Samuel Jordan Center for Persian Studies and Culture was founded in 2009 by microtechnology pioneer Dr. Fariborz Maseeh and the Massiah Foundation and is administered by the School of Humanities. The center is named after a missionary in the early 1900s who became a leading educational figure in Iran and is the first interdisciplinary center in the University of California system dedicated entirely to Persian studies not based in a department of Near East or Middle East studies. Since its inception, the center has hosted numerous conferences on the Iranian world, established research clusters uniting scholars on the study of the Tehran Project, alternative music, the Digital Archive of Middle Persian Inscriptions, and Sasanika (Late Antique Iran Project), and, under the leadership of Daryaee, established an online peer-reviewed Journal,DABIR, dedicated to the study of Iran and related material.

To learn more about the Dr. Samuel M. Jordan Center for Persian Studies and Culture, please click here.

To provide support and enhance the study of Persian language and culture at UC Irvine, please contact Nicole Balsamo, senior director of development, at nbalsamo@uci.edu or 949-824-2923.

Read Full Story Here: http://www.humanities.uci.edu/SOH/about/press_release_det.php?id=165