Edmund herzig biography

Position:

Masoumeh and Fereydoon Soudavar Professor of Persian Studies; Fellow of Wadham College

Faculty / College Address:

Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies / Wadham College

Email:

edmund.herzig@ames.ox.ac.uk

Profile:

I came to Oxford University in 2006 after eighteen years at the University of Manchester.

As a student, I read Russian and Persian for my first degree at Cambridge and went on to graduate work in Near Eastern Studies at Princeton, before writing my doctoral thesis at Oxford on the New Julfa Armenian merchants of Isfahan in the Safavid age (16th-18th centuries), spending a year researching and learning the language in Armenia along the way.

I continue to work on the premodern and early modern history of Iran and neighbouring regions, including the Caucasus, Central Asia and Afghanistan, concentrating on early modern trade, commercial practice and law, on wider questions relating to early modern intercommunal relations and cultural exchange, and