Almut Hintze - Biography#

Almut Hintze studied Classics and Indo-European philology at Heidelberg, Oxford and Erlangen Universities and took her PhD in 1990 with an edition of the Avestan Zamyād Yašt. From 1990 to 1996 she taught Indo-Iranian Studies at the Freie Universität Berlin, where she did her habilitation in 1997. She subsequently held a Heisenberg research professorship of the German National Research Association (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft) and a fellowship at Clare Hall College, Cambridge. Since 1998 she has been teaching Zoroastrianism, Avestan and Pahlavi at the School of Oriental and African Studies in the University of London, where she now holds the endowed Zartoshty Brothers Chair of Zoroastrianism. Since 2018 she has also been Co-Chair of the endowed SOAS Shapoorji Pallonji Institute of Zoroastrian Studies. In 2015 she was elected Fellow of the British Academy.

Almut Hintze has published on Indo-Iranian and, especially, Avestan philology. Her major publications include a study of the semantics of words for ‘reward’ in Vedic and Avestan (2000), commentaries and annotated critical editions of Zoroastrian sacred texts, in particular of the Avestan Zamyād Yašt (1994) and the Yasna Haptanghaiti (2007). She has worked and published with Zoroastrian high priests, including Dastur K. M. JamaspAsa, in whose private collections in Bombay in 1989 she discovered an important Avestan manuscript believed to be lost, and Dastur F. M. Kotwal, with whom she published a facsimile edition of the Khorde Avesta and Yasht manuscript E1 (2008). She has also published numerous articles in books, journals and encyclopaedias dealing with problems of Avestan language and text composition, Indo-Iranian philology, and Zoroastrian religion. She is co-editor of the series Corpus Avesticum (Brill).

Almut Hintze has been recipient of three major research awards (two ERC Advanced Grants and one by the UK AHRC). At SOAS she leads a group of doctoral and postdoctoral researchers working on Zoroastrianism and related topics.