Goethe Fellow
Linguist Saloumeh Gholami Receives Prestigious Global Professorship from the British Academy
Gholami is honored for her research on the oral traditions of the Zoroastrians. We congratulate her on this achievement.

The British Academy’s Global Professorships offer outstanding scholars the opportunity to conduct research at a British university over a period of five years. Among those selected this year is Professor Saloumeh Gholami, whose research project »Persisting Through Change: A Study of Oral Literature and Cultural Interaction in the Zoroastrian Community« was nominated by the University of Cambridge for one of these coveted positions and ultimately selected by the British Academy. Professor Gholami will be supported by a grant of approximately one million euros when she begins her research on September 1, 2024.

Her research focuses on the oral traditions of Zoroastrians transmitted in the endangered Zoroastrian Dari (Behdini) language. She analyzes the development of these traditions within the Zoroastrian community and how they are influenced by Islamic culture. Saloumeh’s aim is to show the cultural dynamics between the language, literature and society of the minority in the context of the majority culture.

Saloumeh Gholami has been Professor of Minority Languages in the Middle East at the Institute for Empirical Linguistics at Goethe University Frankfurt since 2020 and a member of the board of directors of the LOEWE focus area »Minority Studies: Language and Identity.« In 2022, she was awarded a fellowship at the Oxford School of Rare Jewish Languages (OSRJL), where she worked on Gorani manuscripts in Hebrew script. Since 2023, she has also been a Goethe Fellow at the Forschungskolleg Humanwissenschaften in pursuit her project on the concept of »language islands.«