Rahim Shayegan

M. Rahim Shayegan is Professor of Iranian and the Ancient Near East and the Eleanor and Jahangir Amuzegar Chair in the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Cultures (NELC) at UCLA. At UCLA, he also serves as the founding director of the Pourdavoud Institute for the Study of the Iranian World, the founding director of the Yarshater Center for the Study of Iranian Literary Traditions, and the founding director of the Jeffrey P. Cunard Center for Global Antiquity. 

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.