Support of Iranian Studies In Ravenna

P

rof. emeritus Antonio Panaino is a much respected veteran of Iranian Studies at the Ravenna branch of the University of Bologna who, in order to maintain the long and strong tradition of Iranian studies in Italy, has agreed with the Department of Cultural Heritage to co-fund one-year positions for ‘Research Fellows at the University of Bologna, branch of Ravenna under his supervision. The Soudavar Memorial Foundation is happy to collaborate with an eminent professor of Iranian Studies at his prestigious university with partial support for the two following post-doctoral projects.

  1. Andrea Gariboldi: “Commerce, Exchanges and Coins in Pahlavi texts”. This original project aims to clarify a series of problems concerning the history of the monetary economy of Sasanian Persia, which are of fundamental importance for the development of  studies on pre-Islamic Iran.
  2. Paolo Ognibene, Adjunct professor at the School of Arts, Humanities and Cultural Heritage of the University of Bologna, is a specialist of Slavic and Iranian philology with 80 publications to his credit. His main field of research is outer Iran (from antiquity to now) with special interest in onomastics, problems of ethnic identity, the structure of Iranian nomadic societies in the ancient and medieval worlds, contemporary linguistic and ethnic Iranian minorities. From 2007 to 2012, he took part in the Italian archaeological and ethnic mission in Tajikistan (supported by the Italian Ministery of Foreign Affairs and the University of Bologna) to study Yaghnobi traditions and language and the role of this minority in contemporary Tajikistan.

The topic of his project is a translation from Russian to English of Salemann’s Yagnoby Studies, a text of relevant importance for Iranian studies in general and for east Iranian languages in particular. His project, like that of his colleague, Dr. Gariboldi, will co-fund a one-year-position of ‘Research Fellow’ at the University of Bologna, Ravenna btsnvh, under the supervision and tutorship of Prof. Antonio Panaino (Department of Cultural Heritage).

Carl Salemann (russ. Karl Germanovič Zaleman) whose main scientific interests were Middle and Early Modern Persian, devoted part of his life to the studies of several Iranian languages (Old and Middle Iranian    languages: Avestan and Pahlavi and modern Iranian languages, especially Ossetic and Yaghnobi). In the last decades of the 19th century he took part in expeditions in Central Asia (Tajikistan) and collected materials about the Yaghnobi language and folklore, resulting in a book, Jagnobskie ėtjudy.

To have a translation in a widely diffused language of a book written in Russian (in pre-revolutionary Cyrillic) and never published (the proofs are at the Oriental Institute of the Russian Academy of Science in St Peterburg) is very important for Iranian studies, especially for East Iranian languages and Sogdian.