
Research Team

Researcher
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Ruzbeh Vistasp Hodiwala
M.A. (London)
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Ruzbeh is currently pursuing his doctoral studies with the Department of History, Religion, and Philosophies under Dr. Almut Hintze, Zartoshty Brothers Professor for Zoroastrian Studies, and Dr. Nima Mina, Senior Lecturer in Persian and Iranian Studies at SOAS, University of London. His doctoral thesis is on ‘The Historical Origins and Development of the Neo-Zoroastrian Movement: An ethnographic study of Neo-Zoroastrian settlements'.
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He studied Economics at St. Xavier’s College, Ahmedabad in India in 2012-15, and did his MA in Iranian Studies at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London in 2016-17. His academic interest lies in the field of Cultural Anthropology of Religion with a focus on Neo-Zoroastrianism; New Religious Movements; Migration & Diaspora Studies; History, Culture and, Politics of Iran.
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Email: ruzbeh_hodiwala@soas.ac.uk

Supervisory Committee
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The project is supervised by an interdisciplinary committee comprising senior faculty members, viz. Dr. Almut Hintze from the Department of Religions, History & Philosophies, and Professor Arshin Adib-Moghaddam from the Department of Politics and International Studies at SOAS, University of London.
​Professor Almut Hintze
MPhil. (Oxon.), Dr Phil. (Erlangen), Dr Habil. (Berlin), FBA
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Professor Almut Hintze serves as the primary supervisor on the doctoral project’s supervisory panel.
She has studied Indo-European philology at the Universities of Heidelberg and Oxford and earned her Ph.D. in Indo-Iranian Studies at the University of Erlangen. After her habilitation in Berlin with a study of the semantics of “reward” in Ancient Iranian (Avestan) and Vedic Sanskrit texts, she spent a term at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton. Subsequently, she became Research Fellow at Clare Hall, Cambridge, and was appointed to the Zartoshty Brothers post at SOAS in 2001. She was elected Fellow of the British Academy in 2015. She currently directs a collaborative project on the Multimedia Yasna, funded by European Research Council (2016–2021), to produce an interactive film of a complete performance of the Yasna ritual, electronic tools for editing Avestan texts, and a text-critical edition, translation, commentary and dictionary of the Avestan Yasna.
Profile of Almut Hintze
Email: ah69@soas.ac.uk

​Dr. Arshin Adib-Moghaddam
BA, MA (Hamburg); MPhil, PhD (Cantab)
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Arshin Adib-Moghaddam is Professor in Global Thought and Comparative Philosophies at SOAS, University of London and Fellow of Hughes Hall, University of Cambridge. Educated at the Universities of Hamburg, American (Washington DC) and Cambridge, where he received his MPhil and PhD as a multiple scholarship student, Prof. Adib-Moghaddam was the first Jarvis Doctorow Fellow in International Relations and Peace Studies at St. Edmund Hall and the Department of Politics and International Relations, University of Oxford. Adib-Moghaddam received his Professorship at SOAS within eight years after his PhD as one of the youngest academics in his field.
Profile Arshin-Adib-Moghaddam
Email: aa106@soas.ac.u
