Rahim Shayegan

Rahim Shayegan is a professor of Iranian studies in the department of Near Eastern languages and cultures and the director of the Pourdavoud Center for the Study of the Iranian World. Shayegan is an expert on Iranian history and his scholarship has covered the languages, literary traditions and history of Iran and Mesopotamia from antiquity to the early medieval period.

His research focuses to the dialectics at play in cultural and intellectual exchanges between Iran, Mesopotamia and the Greco-Roman world on the one side, and Central Asia, India and China on the other. His interest in establishing connections between neighboring regions reflects his interest in the linguistically heterogeneous empires of (late) antiquity, whose political, ideological, and religious structures are the results of complex processes of cultural borrowings and acculturation.