Current Trends in Avestan Studies
Abstract
This lecture discusses the major progress made in our understanding of the Avestan corpus/texts in the last years. Based on her recent publication co-written with Jean Kellens, L’introduction à l’Avesta, Céline Redard introduces the new vision of the Avesta, leading to the new editions currently undertaken. The important ritual aspect will also be underlined, with some concrete examples taken from her books The Srōš Drōn – Yasna 3 to 8, and The Gujarati Ritual Directions of the Paragnā, Yasna and Visperad Ceremonies (co-written with Kerman Daruwalla).
Citation
Redard, Céline. "Current Trends in Avestan Studies," Pourdavoud Center Lecture Series. February 16, 2022.
About the Speaker
Céline Redard
University of Strasbourg
Before specializing in Iranian Studies, she studied Indo-European Linguistics, Sanskrit and Latin in Switzerland (Licence ès Lettres et Sciences Humaines, University of Neuchâtel, 2005). In 2010, she obtained her PhD at EPHE (Paris, France) for her doctoral thesis with an edition, translation and commentary on Vidēvdād 19. After working as a research assistant at the Collège de France (Paris) from 2008 to 2014, she was awarded a Marie Curie Fellowship (BeIPD-COFUND) at the University of Liège in Belgium (2014-2016). During that time, she concentrated her research on the link between the so-called Long Liturgy and the short liturgies. From 2017 to 2022, she worked as a Postdoctoral Researcher attached to the Multimedia Yasna (MuYa) Project funded by the European Research Council and directed by Prof. Almut Hintze at SOAS (London). In 2022-2023, she was attached to the Institute ITI HiSAAR at the University of Strasbourg (France) as a researcher. She carried out her research on the Gujarati ritual directions in the manuscripts with the aim to study the transmission of the ritual in India from the 16th century until now. She published several books, among them a critical edition with commentaries of Yasna 3 to 8. She has also edited several books, including Persian Religion in the Achaemenid Period with Wouter Henkelman (2017).