Institute of Iranian Studies

International Cooperation

ERASMUS+ Key Action 107

Since the summer semester of 2019, the Department of Iranian Studies has had two existing partnerships with the University of Kashan and the Allameh Tabataba'i University in Tehran as part of ERASMUS + Key Action 107.

The funding is aimed at employees and doctoral students of the department of Iranian Studies.


Cooperation with India

We also have close relations with Delhi University and Jawaharlal Nehru University. In cooperation with Prof. Chander Shekhar, the Institute conducted two summer schools on Indo-Persian documents in 2018 (Göttingen) and 2019 (Hyderabad). Further information on the summer schools can be found here.


At the Indraprastha College for Women at Delhi University, a joint workshop on “Sufism in India - A view from Delhi” was organized together with Dr. Meenakshi Khanna as part of the Namaste+ program. Another day of the program was organized together with Prof. Najaf Haider (JNU).


Cooperation with Uzbekistan

Initial contacts were established with Samarkand State University during a visit in February 2019. The ongoing cooperation continued with further cooperation with Bukhara State University. Two excursions, several courses, and many lectures were offered in the frame of the DAAD project “European Perspectives in Dialogue: Central Asia and Western Research”. A selected group of students from the University of Göttingen joined their peers from Samarkand and Bukhara State Universities from 15.5.2023 to 29.5.2023. During this two-week excursion, students enjoyed an international atmosphere to participate in courses on travelogues on Central Asia and academic research, learn and exchange ideas, and get to know the vibrant cities of Samarkand and Bukhara.

The cooperation continued in the next months with visits from cooperating universities, both for academic and administrative purposes, among which was, for example, a lecture by Dr. Mehriniso Rakhmatova on “Cognitive and pragmatic aspects of aesthetic value and its culture-specific peculiarities in English, Tajik and Uzbek Languages”. The students from all three universities also had the opportunity to participate in the WiSe 2023/24 course on “Through the Others’ Lens: Photography and Recording the unknown Orient in Central Asia” taught by Dr. Roxana Zenhari.

At the start of SoSe 2024, a further step was taken by organizing two-week long block seminars in the form of a workshop from 2.4.2024 to 14.4.2024. During these two weeks, selected groups of students from Bukhara and Samarkand State University joined their peers in Göttingen to participate in three courses on “Literary and Linguistic Aspects of European Descriptions of Central Asia”, “Murder, Slavery, and Idleness: Orientalism in Travelogues from Central Asia”, and “Academic Writing”. During these two weeks, visiting students from Uzbekistan had the opportunity to learn about the academic structure of German universities and Iranian Studies offered at the University of Göttingen. For a report on this workshop, you can find more information here. The seminars ended with an excursion to Berlin during which the students visited ZOiS (Zentrum für Osteuropa- und internationale Studien), Reichstag, and Humboldt Forum. The visits further helped all students to understand academic work in Europe in the hope of inspiring them to pursue their future studies in ways that can strengthen international cooperation and develop more such experiences in the future.