Andrea Piras

Professor of Iranology at University of Bologna and University Ca’Foscari of Venice. Member of the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton.

Specialist in writings, languages, texts and cultural history of pre-Islamic Iran and Central Asia. Among his research interests: Avestan and Pahlavi texts, epigraphic corporaand pragmatics of communication (epistolography), Manichaean texts and images. Contacts between Iran, Greece, Rome, Byzantium and Empires of the Steppes. Religious history of the Iranian world (myth and ritual, eschatology, soteriology, asceticism, ecstasy, apocalypticism); phenomena of interaction between Zoroastrianism, Manichaeism, Buddhism, Christianity and Islam. Director of the Laboratory of Ethnohistory of Iranian and Caucasian Area.