Daniel J. Sheffield

Daniel J. Sheffield is an Associate Professor in the Department of Near Eastern Studies at Princeton University, serving as Director of Undergraduate Studies. He holds a Ph.D. in Iranian and Persian Studies from Harvard University (2012). Previously, he held positions at the University of Washington and as a Link-Cotsen Postdoctoral Fellow at Princeton's Society of Fellows.

His research focuses on the religious, intellectual, and social history of the medieval and early modern Persian-speaking world, with specialties in exchanges between Safavid Iran and Mughal India, Zoroastrian communities, and the transmission of ideas from Late Antiquity to Early Modernity. His current work explores language, translation, and religious thought, exemplified by his manuscript Cosmopolitan Zarathustras and an upcoming project on translation and toleration in Safavid and Mughal contexts.

Teaching includes undergraduate courses on Iranian history, graduate seminars on Persian historiography, and ancient Iranian language instruction. He organizes a Classical Persian reading group for students. His recent publications appear in major edited volumes on Zoroastrianism and philology.

Award-winning educator and researcher, he is affiliated with the Behrman Faculty Fellows program. Beyond academia, he enjoys cooking, accordion playing, and family life with his young child.