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Education
- BA in History, American University, 2021
- MA in Iranian Studies, NELC, University of California, Los Angeles, 2024
Ethan Friedland
Graduate Student
E-mail: efriedland@g.ucla.edu
I am a 6th year PhD candidate in Iranian Studies. I’m primarily interested in the development of ancient Iranian religious traditions from the Achaemenid to Sasanian periods (~550 BCE to ~650 CE). My dissertation, Discourses on Conversion to Zoroastrianism in the Sasanian Period, examines how Zoroastrians conceptualized, discussed, and practiced religious conversion in Late Antiquity. I examine the Avesta, the Pahlavi Zand (exegesis), Pahlavi apocalypses, and the Syriac Martyr Acts to suggest that ancient Zoroastrianism hosted a tension between the universalist desire to share the dēn (the sum of Zoroastrian traditions) with all the world, and an exclusionary desire to limit the horizons of the Zoroastrian world to the Iranian ethnos. As my dissertation progresses, I hope to determine how the Late Antique priesthood and the Sasanian kings resolved or regulated this tension between boundary-making and universalism through discourse.
I am also very interested in Achaemenid Official Aramaic letters and inscriptions and their afterlife in Hellenistic Anatolia, and enjoy reading the Rig Veda.