Roshan Cultural Heritage Institute is delighted to announce a new grant to hold three annual programs at the UCI Jordan Center for Persian Studies and Culture, under the leadership of Professor Touraj Daryaee, UCI Maseeh Chair in Persian Studies and Culture. Professor Daryaee, in collaboration with the new Elahé Omidyar Mir-Djalali Presidential Chair in Art History and Archaeology of Ancient Iran, will organize the annual Elahé Omidyar Mir-Djalali Symposium on Ancient Iranian History and Civilization; while Nasrin Rahimieh, UCI Howard Baskerville Professor of Humanities, will organize the annual Elahé Omidyar Mir-Djalali Symposium on Persian Language and Literature. The first symposium is planned for the fall quarter 2017, and the second symposium will be held in the spring quarter 2018. In conjunction with each symposium, the senior scholar will give a public Elahé Omidyar Mir-Djalali Lecture, which will be open to the Orange County community. The lectures will be recorded and available online.

Professor Daryaee is a specialist in Iranian history, in particular the Sasanian Empire, and has been teaching in the Department of History at UCI since 2007. In 2015, he was appointed Director of the UCI Jordan Center for Persian Studies and Culture, which serves as a hub for interdisciplinary research projects that bridge the arts, humanities, engineering, medicine, and the sciences with Persian studies. Since its inception in 2009, 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 established an online peer-reviewed Journal, DABIR, dedicated to the study of Iran and related material.

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