Anahit Georgievna Perikhanian (1928 - 2012)
Dr. Anahit Perikhanian, one of the foremost scholars in the field of Iranian philology as well as the social institutions of Iran and Armenia in the Parthian and Sasanian periods, was Senior Research Fellow at the St. Petersburg branch of the Institute of Oriental Studies of the Russian Academy of Sciences. Her most recent book is Materials for an Etymological Dictionary of Classical Armenian:I - Loan words from Middle Iranian Languages (in Russian; Erevan, 1994).
Nina Garsoïan
Born in Paris in 1923 into a milieu of émigrés from Russia, bilingual from infancy, and transported to New York before her teens in 1933, Dr. Nina Garsoïan has as she puts it, “never managed to achieve a single-minded or whole-hearted patriotism.” Despite her Armenian ethnic background, she has been happy and loved, especially Paris and Venice, but also the Armenian and French countrysides, Nantucket, coastal New England and New York, but none of them has been her exclusive home. An additional break was further added in her life by the circumstances that forced her to transform its earlier preparation as a concert pianist to an academic career after the accident which made the earlier goal impossible. Dr. Garsoïan received her AB degree from Bryn Mawr College in 1943 in Classical Archaeology and her MA and PhD from Columbia University in 1946 and 1958 in Byzantine, Near Eastern and Armenian History. She has received Fulbright, Guggenheim and two National Endowment Senior Fellowship Exchanges with the Soviet Academy of Sciences, as well as the Anania Narekac‘i and Mesrop Mashtots Medals for academic distinction in 1988 and 1993. She has taught at Smith College, Columbia and Princeton Universities. Dr. Garsoïan was the first female dean of the Graduate School at Princeton University, a two-term trustee of the Ford Foundation, the vice-chairman and member of the board of the ACLS, and the coeditor for Byzantium, the Sasanians and the Christian East of the “Encyclopedia of the Middle Ages.” Her primary field of interest is the coexistence and interaction of the two superpowers of the early Christian period —the Byzantine Empire and Sasanian Persia—especially as seen in Medieval Armenia on whose neglected Iranian component she has focussed. Consequently, as the holder of the Armenian Chair created for her at Columbia University in 1979, she has been instrumental in establishing the field of Medieval Armenian History in the United States and has published multiple books, journal and encyclopedia articles on Armenian, Byzantine and Sasanian subjects. At present, Dr. Garsoïan is Avedissian Professor Emerita of Armenian History and Civilization at Columbia University and director of the “Revue des études arméniennes” in Paris. She is also a Fellow of the Medieval Academy of America and a Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy.