Professor Saloumeh Gholami

Professor Saloumeh Gholami is the British Academy Global Professor in the field of Zoroastrian Studies at the Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies, University of Cambridge. In this capacity, she leads the project Persisting Through Change: A Study of Oral Literature and Cultural Interaction in the Zoroastrian Community.

She earned her PhD in Iranian Studies from the Georg-August-Universität Göttingen, Germany, with a dissertation entitled Selected Features of Bactrian Grammar.Her academic trajectory continued with a Habilitation in Comparative Linguistics from Goethe University Frankfurt in 2022; her habilitation thesis focused on the colophons and marginal notes of Zoroastrian manuscripts.

From 2020 to 2024, she served as Professor of Minority Languages in the Middle East at Goethe University Frankfurt. During this period, she also served as Co–Principal Investigator and a member of the directorate of the research cluster Minority Studies: Language and Identity, funded by the Hessian Ministry for Science and the Arts.

In 2023, she was awarded the Oxford School of Rare Jewish Languages Visiting Fellowship at the University of Oxford, where she conducted a project on the colophons of Judeo-Iranian manuscripts.

Professor Gholami’s expertise lies in the documentation, safeguarding, and revitalisation of endangered languages, as well as in the promotion of linguistic diversity, particularly among religious minority communities (e.g., Zoroastrians, Jews, and Ahl-e Haqq). 

Her research combines philological analysis with fieldwork, illuminating not only linguistic structures but also the broader social and historical dynamics that shape interactions between minority communities and the dominant religious and cultural frameworks in Iran.