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Michael Stausberg Conferences and Lectures |
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Conferences/Lectures |
During my time in Heidelberg I attended very few conferences. There, the main challenge was to keep up with all the symposia, workshops, and conferences held at Heidelberg University. Moreover, I was focused on, if not obsessed by, the task of completing my trilogy on Zoroastrianism. This being done, and having moved to Bergen (in 2004), I started to enjoy attending conferences. Ever since, I happened to attend some 4-6 conferences or workshops a year, but I try not to attend too many in order to save some time to doing primary research and writing articles and books rather than conference papers. Apart from attending conferences or symposia, since joining the Department at Bergen I gave guest lectures at several European Universities. Moreover, I held lectures at the Collčge de France (2005) on a polytheistic reading of the Avestan texts and the Getty Foundation (2007) on Zoroastrian festivals.
In Heidelberg, I arranged the first international conference for the study of Zoroastrian rituals (in April 2002). Revised versions of most papers have since been published in the form of an edited volume. At the same time, our research group put up a photographic exhibition featuring the work of one Iranian and one Indian photographer on Zoroastrian rituals at the Völkerkundemuseum der von Portheim-Stiftung Heidelberg. In Bergen, at the end of June 2007, I had the pleasure of welcoming colleagues from 9 West European countries who have all been engaged in the study of religion from a regional and local perspective. This is the first time we met as a group and we had some exciting discussions. In the meanwhile, the papers have been published as a special issue of Religion (issue 39/2; 2009).
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