Touraj Daryaee

Touraj Daryaee, born in 1967, is an Iranian historian and Iranologist best known for his research on ancient Iran, particularly the Sasanian period. He earned his PhD in history from the University of California, Los Angeles, in 1999 and currently holds the Maseeh Chair in Persian Studies and Culture at the University of California, Irvine. He is also the director of the university’s Dr. Samuel M. Jordan Center for Persian Studies and Culture.

In 2025, the University of California, Irvine, announced that the Samuel Jordan Center for Persian Studies had become the new home of Encyclopaedia Iranica and that Daryaee had been appointed its new editor-in-chief.

Daryaee’s research focuses on ancient and medieval Iranian history, especially the Sasanian Empire. Alongside political history, he has studied social history, administrative structures, Zoroastrianism, Middle Persian language and literature, numismatics, and the concept of Iranshahr.

The significance of Daryaee’s work lies in his refusal to view the Sasanian period merely as a prelude to the Arab conquest or as a history confined to kings. Instead, he presents it as a crucial era in the formation of administrative institutions, Iranian identity, religious and cultural traditions, and Iran’s connections with the world of Late Antiquity. For this reason, his book Sasanian Persia occupies an important place among modern studies of Sasanian Iran.

In addition to teaching and academic research, Daryaee has been active in specialized Iranological publications and projects. He has collaborated with journals such as Name-ye Iran-e Bastan and with projects devoted to Sasanian history and culture, publishing numerous works as both author and editor.

In 2010, his book Sasanian Persia: The Rise and Fall of an Empire won the British-Kuwait Friendship Society Prize in Middle Eastern Studies, awarded by the British Society for Middle Eastern Studies for outstanding contributions to the field.