Enrico Raffaelli

Enrico Rafaelli is a professor at the University of Toronto at Mississauga. Enrico Giuseppe Raffaelli was born in Rome, Italy on 24 June 1975. He received his primary education at the Classical High School Orazio. During his undergraduate studies at the University of Rome La Sapienza, he specialised in Iranian studies, with a focus on Zoroastrianism and on the languages of pre-Islamic Iran. He graduated in April 1998, with the highest mark, with a dissertation on some Zoroastrian texts dealing with astrology. From 1999 to 2004, he was a Ph.D. student in Iranian Studies at the
University of Naples L¹Orientale in conjunction with also at the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes ­ Section of Religious Sciences. His thesis, dedicated to the Sih-rozag, a section of the Avesta, the sacred text of Zoroastrianism, includes a philological and a historic-religious analysis.

For his Ph.D. researches, he spent two years in Paris, following several courses on the languages of pre-Islamic Iran and on the history of Zoroastrianism at the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes and at the Collège de France. His thesis, evaluated in March 2004 by a mixed French-Italian board, received the highest mark. After the Ph.D., he spent one year in St. Petersburg, Russia, from 2004 to 2005, making some researches at the Institute of Iranian Studies of the Academy of Sciences. His teaching experiences in the History of Zoroastrianism include the cooperation, from 2005 on, with the chair of Religious History of Iran of the University La Sapienza, as a member of the examining panels and a supervisor of undergraduate researches. He published the book L¹oroscopo del mondo (³The horoscope of the world², 2001), dealing with astrology in Zoroastrianism, its relation with Mesopotamian,Classical and Indian astrology, and its influence on Islamic astrology. Several essays of his, dealing mainly with astrology in pre-Islamic Iran, and with the Sih-rozag text, were published in acts of International Conferences he took part to, books and scientific journals.

His Ph. D. thesis will soon be published, in a French translation, in the series Acta Iranica. His present research activities include the collaboration to the project of the ³Middle Persian Dictionary², which is being prepared in cooperation by the Universities of Rome and Jerusalem. For this project, he is preparing the edition of several Middle Persian Zoroastrian texts. His main research projects are the edition and the study of some astrological Zoroastrian texts, and a comparative study on Zoroastrian, Mesopotamian, Hebrew and Islamic Wisdom literature.