My name is Khodadad Rezakhani, and I am a scholar of late antiquity and the early medieval period, mostly in West and Central Asia. I also work on the languages and texts of these regions and their relevance to the history of the first millennium CE. I usually approach these regions not from a modern, nation-state based point of view, but rather from a global, connective, vantage point. As such, I am interested in related subjects and regions as well and generally keep myself informed of European, Byzantine, Scandinavian, South Asian, and Chinese history. I am also very much interested in the Silk Road, which I suggest is a useless idea and in fact contributes to reducing the history of Central Asia to a footnote of world history. I have written an article (The Road That Never Was) about the Silk Road (and am developing that to a book) as well as a book on the history of late antique Central Asia (ReOrienting the Sasanians).

I hold a PhD on late antique Near East from UCLA and am a professional academic, currently working at Princeton University. My daily life consists of teaching, researching, and writing articles (and catching up with deadlines!). However, I have a deep interest in bringing academic research to the public and find producing knowledge for purely academic audiences to be undemocratic and against the spirit of knowledge. As such, I try to engage in anyway I can, giving interviews to TV and Radio programmes and appearing on various segments dedicated to history. But more than anything, I try to use the internet, and have done so since 1996 (!) to engage, through my podcasts and my weblog, and make sure that what me and my colleagues are working on does not remain behind the locked doors of academic journals.

This site is a place for me to gather all my various  projects. It serves as a home for my History of Iran Podcast, my Persian Podcast, and the History Page (where I provide a readable survey of Iranian and Central Asian history), as well as links to my  sundry appearances in and around the cyber world, and my weblogs (the Swift Appraisal and the Historylog). I occasionally will post little articles or notes about subjects that I find interesting or informative in these weblogs, so check back for updates often! Also, check out my @historiansofIran project on Twitter!

Here, you can see my academia.edu webpage. My current CV can also be found here.

This is my older Persian Weblog which might be of interest to those who can read Persian (the old old Persian weblog, which was written from 2001 to 2010, is sadly lost!).