
Ph.D., Near Eastern Languages and Cultures, UCLA, 2018
Ani Honarchiansaky is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in Princeton University’s Seeger Center for Hellenic Studies, Co-sponsored by the Committee for the Study of Late Antiquity. Ani Honarchiansaky received her MA in Iranian Studies and her Ph.D. in Armenian Studies from the Near Eastern Languages and Cultures Department at the University of California, Los Angeles.
Her work has focused on the social and cultural history of the Roman Empire and Sasanian Iran with Armenia as the focal point. In her dissertation, she applied world history methods to the study of the Late Antique Near East. She has studied how the history of the Armenian Church and the Church of the East were affected by each other and by the social, cultural, political and economic relationships between the two great empires of late antiquity.
She studies the literary, hagiographic, and historiographic accounts produced by the authorities of these two Churches and the way in which these accounts constitute a Christian congruity by relating and thinking about the Roman and Sasanian authorities, about themselves, and each other.
She is interested in the history of how these Christian communities imagined their possibilities and limits living under the Sasanians and later Islam. This brought her to her current project, where she will explore the role of taxation, violence, and military recruitment in defining and shaping contexts for coexistence of Christians within Sasanian Iran.