Interns | The Cambridge Shahnama Centre for Persian Studies

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.

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...

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.

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.

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.

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