Almut Hintze

Almut Hintze is the Zartoshty Brothers Professor of Zoroastrianism at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London, where she also co-chairs the Shapoorji Pallonji Institute of Zoroastrian Studies. She earned her MPhil from Oxford, Dr phil from Erlangen, and Dr habil from Freie Universität Berlin, with research fellowships at Princeton's Institute for Advanced Study and Clare Hall, Cambridge.

Her research focuses on Indo-Iranian philology, Zoroastrian ritual performance, and digital preservation of ancient texts. She directs major projects including The Multimedia Yasna (MUYA), which combines ritual film documentation with critical editions of Avestan manuscripts, and AVINDIA exploring Avestan rituals in India. Her work integrates linguistics, archaeology, and digital humanities to analyze:

• Ritual semantics and textual transmission
• Sasanian administrative practices through bullae analysis
• Interreligious eschatological concepts
• Manuscript preservation using IIIF frameworks

She leads a research team investigating Zoroastrianism through ERC and AHRC grants, including projects on Sasanian seals at Taxt-e Solaymān and digital annotation tools. Her publications demonstrate sustained focus on Avestan philology, ritual structure, and cross-cultural religious motifs, with recent work emphasizing archaeological-epigraphic synthesis.

Honors include Fellowship of the British Academy (2015), presidency of Societas Iranologica Europaea (2011), and editorship of Corpus Avesticum. Major awards:

• ERC Advanced Grants (2015, 2023)
• AHRC Standard Grant (2023)
• Festschrift The Reward of the Righteous (2022)
• Election to Union Académique Internationale (2021)

She supervises doctoral researchers working on Sasanian architecture, Neo-Zoroastrian movements, Avestan hymns, and Sogdian dhāraṇīs, maintaining active collaborations with Zoroastrian communities in India and Iran.