All People

Bita Daryabari

Bita Daryabari embodies the spirit of humanist philanthropy. She received her bachelor in Computer Science then Master’s degree in Telecommunication Management at Golden Gate University in California. Upon graduation, she joined GammmaLink, Inc., one of the early pioneers in the field of telecommunications. She later moved to MCI Communications where, more than once, she received...

Dr Firuza Melville

Director of Research

Dr Firuza Melville is a graduate (hons.) of St Petersburg University, where she received her PhD in Persian Literature, Art and Islamic Studies, and taught until 2005. After a term in Ann Arbor as a Fulbright Professor and a term in Princeton, in the Institut for Advanced Study, she left St Petersburg as an Associate Professor for Oxford where she was teaching Persian literature at the Faculty of Oriental Studies. Dr Melville was also a Fellow of Wadham College, Oxford where she was Tutor, Supervisor and Director of Studies for all undergraduate and graduate students reading Persian, Arabic, Turkish, Egyptian, Armenian, and Syriac, as well as Curator of the Ferdawsi Library and the Persian manuscript collection. In 2010 she moved to Cambridge as Iran Heritage Foundation Research Fellow at Pembroke College. Since 2013 she is Director of Research of the Cambridge Shahnameh Centre for Persian Studies. She has been AMES Director of Studies in Pembroke College, Peterhouse and Corpus Christi.

Her research interests include mediaeval Persian book art, Persian literature, contemporary Iranian art, Russian cultural Orientalism in Central Asia and the Caucasus, especially in literature, visual art, opera and ballet, and the history of Russo-Persian diplomacy of the early Qajar period

Professor Charles Melville

Charles Melville is Professor of Persian History at the University of Cambridge and a Fellow of Pembroke College. He has a BA (1st class Hons.) in Arabic and Persian from Cambridge (1972), an MA in Islamic History (London SOAS, 1973) and a PhD on the Historical seismicity of Iran (Cambridge, 1978). His main research interests are in the history and historiography of Iran in the Mongol to Safavid periods (13th-17th centuries), and...

Fatima Zahra Hassan

Fatima Zahra Hassan was educated at the National College of Art Lahore and Royal College of Art London where she got her MA with distinction and was then offered to do PhD in Visual Islamic and Traditional Arts from the Prince’s School of Traditional Arts, London in 1997. Zahra, as she prefers to be called has taught since 1994, extensively on Indian, Mughal & Persian miniature painting and drawing...

Misha Kordestani

Misha Kordestani worked on the Shahnama Project as an intern in the summer of 2013. Although she thinks of her future University studies to be more connected with science, Misha used three weeks of her vacation to learn in quite an intense way about the history of Persian culture, in which she has developed a very strong interest together with her family. It was beneficial for the Project, apart from her contribution...

Veronica Shimanovskaya

Ms Veronica Shimanovskaya has a BA+MA in Architecture from the University of Architecture and Civil Engineering in St.Petersburg, an MA in Liberal Arts from Harvard University and an MA in Fine Art from the School of Arts and Digital Industries at the University of East London, where she is currently engaged in the Professional Doctorate programme.

Peyvand Firouzeh

Peyvand completed her BA (2004) and MA (2007) in architecture at the University of Art in Tehran. After having worked as a teaching assistant in the same institution and as an architect, she came to Cambridge in 2010 to do an MPhil in History of Art and Architecture. In her dissertation, she studied representations of architectural perception in travelogues and geographical treatises of 11th and 12th-century Iran.

Ünver Rüstem

Ünver Rüstem specialises in the art and architecture of the Islamic world, with a focus on the Ottoman Empire in its later centuries. He is particularly interested in East-West intersections and interactions, and his BA and MA, both from the University of London (SOAS and UCL), were jointly in Islamic and European art history. He earned his doctorate at Harvard University, where he wrote a dissertation on the architectural transformation of eighteenth-century Istanbul, a project for which he was awarded a Junior Fellowship at Istanbul's Research Center for Anatolian Civilizations. Before coming to Cambridge, he was a Mellon Post-Doctoral Teaching Fellow and Lecturer at Columbia University.

Hamid Reza Ghelichkhani

Hamid Reza Ghelichkhani started learning calligraphy in 1984 together with well-known masters such as Amirkhani and Movahed Hosseini, and received his degree with distinction in 1989. In 1994 he published his calligraphy reference book entitled A Dictionary of Calligraphy and the Related Arts and since then, he has published twelve books on the subject. He has also been a chair in numerous conferences and seminars...

Jonathan Pittock

Jonathan Pittock, owner of the company SKN3, is a web developer, programmer and artist. Jonathan has a history of working with computer game development but has also polished his skill to develop websites. Jonathan has many years of working with web technologies which he has utilised to create a platform for the Pembroke Shahnama Websites.

Loully Saney

Loully is a graduate of Princeton University where she earned a Bachelor of Arts in Politics and Certificates in Near Eastern Studies & History and the Practice of Diplomacy. Since graduating from Princeton, she has worked across the private and public sectors in consulting, government, and nonprofit management.

In the summer of 2011 she interned for the Shahnama Project, specifically working to enhance the digital presence of the project. She worked to create electronic data sources for manuscripts in several collections and provided recommendations on potential sources of financial support.

Saney has also studied at the University of Tehran where she received a certificate with honors in Persian Language from the International Center for Persian Studies.

Emilio Risoli

Emilio Risoli is currently a sixth form student at Haberdashers’ Aske’s Boys’ School in Hertfordshire. In the near future he intends to apply to Cambridge to read history. During the summer of 2015 he helped out with the Shahnama project as an intern, especially concentrating on the presence of Shahnama in various media outlets, reading and preparing materials for the Centre’s website.

Sergey Feofanov

Sergey Feofanov worked as a senior stage and graphic designer for the editorial board at the Central Channel of the National Russian Television (programmes for children) between 1978 and 1987. He also worked as a stage designer at children’s theatres in Russia and abroad. In 1986 he was the director of the project design...

Naciem Nikkhah

It was in 2011 when Naciem Nikkhah first stepped into the office of the Shahnama Project to start volunteering as an online editor. First on site, and now from Northern California, Naciem continues to review the textual content accompanying the images of the Shahnama manuscripts acquired from collections around the world and displayed on the website of the Cambridge Shahnama Project database.

Frankie Enticknap

Frankie Enticknap is a graduate of Visual, Material and Museum Anthropology at the University of Oxford. In the autumn of 2020 she helped to organise the Shahnama Centre’s new library, catalogue its artworks, update its website and conduct digitisation of its manuscripts

Archie Williams

Archie is a recent History graduate of the University of Cambridge, where his undergraduate dissertation argued that the illustrative programme of the 1648 Windsor Shahnama MS Homes 151 (A/6) may be read as an allegory on centre-province relations in late Safavid Persia. In addition to using the Royal Collection archives, his dissertation drew on images and information obtained from the the Shahnama Project website, and benefitted greatly from the advice and support of Dr Firuza Melville. He is currently studying for an MPhil in Islamic Art and Architecture at the Khalili Research Centre at Oxford University, where his work is focussed on North and Subsaharan Africa. As such, he enjoyed his internship at the Shahnama Centre as an opportunity to reconnect with the Persian material which first sparked his interest in Islamic art.

Here is Archie's essay "The Cartoonist and the Demon-King: How the Shahnameh became Wartime Propaganda", which he prepared working as intern at the Centre: http://persian.pem.cam.ac.uk/sites/persian.pem.cam.ac.uk/files/uploads/wysiwyg/Kem%27s%20Wartime%20Shahnama%20Cartoons.pdf

Leili Ahmadi

Leili is a student who has recently completed her GCSE examinations and is aiming to expand her knowledge of Persian literature and history and her cultural heritage generally, although she was born and raised in the United Kingdom.

In August 2022, she was working as an intern at the Cambridge Shahnama Centre for Persian Studies at Pembroke College, helping with processing the images and producing summaries of two historical photography exhibitions, which reflect the political role of Persia in her communication with the two empires during the fin de siecle period - Britain and Russia. The first exhibition which took place both in England and Iran with the accompanying catalogue consists of the photographs of Iran - people of various ethnic groups, nature and architectural monuments, taken over two decades from the 1920s by a Pembroke graduate Laurence Lockhart (1890-1975) during his travels when he was among the first employees of the British Petroleum Company. The second series of the photographs belongs to Alexander Iyas (1869-1914), who was serving under Vladimir Minorsky (1877-1966) during the preparations for the demarcation of the Persian-Turkish border and communication with various Kurdish tribes in the 1920s. A series of the prints of Iyas’s photographs is the latest acquisition of the Centre.

Theresa Zischkin

Theresa is an Art History graduate of the University of St Andrews, where her master's dissertation argued that the visual idioms in the Timurid Mi'rajnama shape religious space and won a prize at the Symposia Iranica in 2019. She is currently pursuing a PhD at Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich under the supervision of Dr Ilse Sturkenboom, focusing on the figural marginalia in the Muraqqa-e Gulshan. As research assistant, she was teaching an undergraduate seminar about the image in Islamic art in the summer term of 2022. Her focus is on the Persianate arts of the book, and she enjoys working at the Shahnama Centre, being mainly involved with the Shahnama Project's database since February 2022.

As a consultant of the Shahnama Project, Theresa is updating the database, locating files and images, as well as checking entries or lines in the Shahnama. She has also been working for an art dealer of medieval and folk art since 2013 and has recently joined an auction house in Vienna, due to her particular fondness of object-based approaches and handling of a variety of objects. In the future, Theresa hopes to be involved with museums, libraries, and other art-related institutions particularly in the field of Islamic arts.