The Multimedia Yasna

Awards and Prizes

MUYA’s Virtual Reality project ‘Living Zoroastrianism’ from Anna Sowa and Almut Hintze has received a Special Mention at the 2020 British Association of Film, Television and Screen Studies (BAFTSS) awards ceremony in the Best Practice Research Portfolio 2020- Installations and Video Essays Special Mentions (Best Practice Research Portfolio 2020).

The judges said that they “found the piece informative and creative, dealing with ancient cultures and rituals, using new VR technology to evoke both the sense of the place and the experience of strangeness in terms of visiting unknown spaces. The work offers a strong contribution to the field of anthropology too as well as creative practice research. It has a documentary aspect which we found fascinating."

Benedikt Peschl received the 2021 prize of the Indogermanische Gesellschaft / Society of Indo-European Studies for the best dissertation in Indo-European Studies for his SOAS thesis entitled The first three hymns of the Ahunauuaitī Gāϑā. The Avestan text of Yasna 28–30 and its tradition.

Céline Redard and Alberto Cantera received the 2021 Roman and Tania Ghirshman prize from the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres for their book Introduction à l'avestique récent.

Mehrbod Khanizadeh was awarded a two year AHRC Research, Development and Engagement fellowship - early career (2022-2024). The aim of Mehrbod's project is to provide an edition of the Pahlavi version of chapters 9-11 of the Yasna, which is dedicated to the Zoroastrian deity-plant Haōma (Pahlavi Hōm). Mehrbod Khanizadeh will use a new approach, following recent discoveries on the creation and transmission of the Pahlavi version of the Yasna. The project will also employ tools of Digital Humanities for the transliteration of manuscripts in Roman letters, collation and creation of a text-critical apparatus. These tools have been developed and used for the edition of the Avestan version of the Yasna in the Multimedia Yasna (MUYA) project. He will produce a critical edition of the text, digitally as well as in print, and also provide a commentary hoping to enrich our understanding of the evolution of the interpretation of Zoroastrian sacred texts and rituals over time and across geographical locations from Iran to India, and the different lines of tradition associated with their transmission.