Director of the Käte Hamburger Kolleg Dynamics in the History of Religions
Professor of History of West Asian Religions
KHK Visiting Research Fellow 2014/15

Kianoosh Rezania holds a M.Sc. in Computer Science from Sharif University of Technology (Tehran 1998), a M.A. in Iranian Studies from the University of Tehran (2002) and a Ph.D. in Old Iranian Studies from the Georg-August University Göttingen (2008). Until 2003, he worked as a software-developer in Tehran. In 2004, he joined in the Department of Iranian Studies at the Georg-August University of Göttingen and commenced his Ph.D.-project on the Zoroastrian image of time, sponsored by the DAAD. Since 2011 he is a research associate (“Wissenschaftlicher Mitarbeiter”) in the Iranian Studies Department of the G.-A.-University of Göttingen and started at the same time his current habilitation-project on the conception of space in the early Zoroastrianism.

Kianoosh Rezania specialized in Old Iranian Studies, especially Zoroastrianism, but he is also interested in Indian Studies, Iranian religions, the history of religions and old Iranian languages. He is the author of Die zoroastrische Zeitvorstellung: eine Untersuchung über Zeit- und Ewigkeitskonzepte und die Frage des Zurvanismus (2010) and editor of Teachers and Teachings in the Good Religion: Opera Minora of Philip G. Kreyenbroek on Zoroastrianism (2013) and Raumkonzeptionen in antiken Religionen. Beiträge des internationalen Symposiums in Göttingen, 28. und 29. Juni 2012 (2014). During his fellowship with us, he will be working on a project entitled The Pahlavi-Literature in Its Context. The interreligious contacts of Islamic and Zoroastrian scholars in the 9th and 10th centuries and the genesis of the Pahlavi-literature.

Education

• Ph.D., Old Iranian Studies, Georg-August University, Göttingen, Germany, 2008
• M.A., Old Iranian Culture and Languages, University of Tehran, Tehran, Iran, 2002
• M.Sc., Computer Science, Sharif University of Technology, 1998
• B.Sc., Computer Science, Sharif University of Technology, 1996

KHK-Fellowship

Duration: October 2014 to March 2016