Cambridge University Festival of Ideas: Ancient stories of the Persian Book of Kings in Modern art, included lectures by Professor Charles Melville, Dr Firuza Abdullaeva, Dr Mahbod Ghaffari and presentations by the artists who participated in the art show ‘Imagining Shahnama in the 21st century’, curated by Veronica Shimanovskaya.

There are hundreds of manuscripts of the poem in existence around the world, created over eight centuries, often accompanied by intricate and fabulous illustrations and miniature paintings. The Shahnama Project was set up in 1999 by Charles Melville, Professor of Persian History with the support of the British Academy grant of £500,000, to hold an archive of images and other records of these manuscripts. The Project became the natural basis of the newly established Pembroke Shahnama Centre for Persian Studies which is currently directed by Dr Firuza Abdullaeva, who formerly taught Persian literature at Oxford and St Petersburg. Symbolically, while a Tutorial Fellow at Wadham College, she was also a curator of the College Firdausi...

When Bita Daryabari was a little girl in Iran, she learned to paint in watercolor and oil. In school she was taught about the country's greatest poets and she memorized and recited their work. Nearly three decades after leaving Iran during the country's war with Iraq and resettling in the United States, she felt her three children lacked a similar education in Persian arts and culture. So the 44-year-old start-up-guru-turned-philanthropist decided to put her hard-earned Silicon Valley fortune towards advocating for the cultural...

Global philanthropist and humanitarian Bita Daryabari is pleased to announce a new $2 million (US) endowment for the Shahnama Project , based in the Shahnama Centre at Pembroke College in Cambridge, England