Encyclopædia Iranica

Ehsan Yarshater was the founding editor of Encyclopædia Iranica from 1973 through 2017. The current editor-in-chief is Elton Daniel. The editorial board includes Mohsen Ashtiany, Mahnaz Moazami, and over 40 consulting editors from major international institutions doing research in Iranian studies.[7] Former long tenured editors include Ahmad Ashraf, Christopher Brunner, Habib Borjian, Kioumars Ghereghlou, Manuchehr Kasheff, Dagmar Riedel and Houra Yavari. A growing number (over 1,300 in 2016) of scholars worldwide have contributed articles to Encyclopædia Iranica.[8]

In 1990, Ehsan Yarshater established the Encyclopædia Iranica Foundation (EIF), which serves to promote the cause of the Encyclopædia Iranica and to ensure its continuation.[9] Over the years, Columbia University's Center for Iranian Studies (also founded by Yarshater) continued to coordinate and edit the Encyclopædia, while the EIF substantially sponsored the work.[10]

The foundation provides the full text of many entries (up to fascicle XVI/3) for free on the iranicaonline.org website.

Following Yarshater's retirement as director of the Center for Iranian Studies in 2016, a dispute began to emerge between Columbia University and the EIF as Columbia unilaterally decided to enter into a contract with Brill, an academic publisher, which subsequently published fascicles 4 and 5 of volume XVI in 2018 and 2019; the EIF protested the move.[11] In 2019, Columbia University sued the EIF, seeking, among other things, a finding that the EIF owns neither a copyright nor an exclusive trademark right in the encyclopedia.[12] EIF countersued alleging that Columbia, as well as Brill and Elton Daniel, breached EIF's copyright in the encyclopedia, infringed, diluted, and counterfeited its trademarks, converted EIF property, and committed various acts of unjust enrichment and unfair competition.[13] On July 31, 2020, the U.S. District Court in the Southern District of New York granted a temporary restraining order against Columbia, Brill and Daniel, enjoining them through October 8, 2020 from publishing additional fascicles.[14] EIF also sought a preliminary injunction against the defendants, but such relief was not entered by the court.[15] Columbia and Brill subsequently published fascicle XVI/6 on October 19, 2020.[16]

As part of the dispute, there are now conflicting accounts as to the current state of the Encyclopædia Iranica. While Columbia has published fascicle XVI/4 through XVI/6, covering topics between "Kešaʾi Dialect" and "Khorsan XIV", by EIF's count volume XVI only covers topics falling alphabetically between KA and KE.[17] EIF considers fascicles XVI/4 through XVI/6 "counterfeit fascicles".[17]

On June 1st 2023 Columbia University and the Encyclopaedia Iranica Foundation Inc., reached an agreement and resolved all pending litigation between the parties. As a result Columbia University closed the Yarshater Center for Iranian Studies on July 1st 2023, with all the staff laid off.

In a review of Volume III, Richard W. Bulliet calls Encyclopædia Iranica "not just a necessity for Iranists [but] of inestimable value for everyone concerned with the history and culture of the Middle East".[18] Ali Banuazizi, though, notes that its focus is on Iran "as perceived, analyzed, and described by its most distinguished, mainly Western, students".[19] In 1998, the journal Iranian Studies devoted a double issue (vol. 31, no. 3/4) to reviews of the encyclopædia, coming to 700 pages by 29 authors on as many subjects.[20] Professor A. Banuazizi, praised that the encyclopaedia "will be judged as the most significant contribution of our century to the advancement of Iranian studies as a scholarly enterprise".[21]

Many foundations, organizations, and individuals have supported Encyclopædia Iranica. The encyclopaedia has been sponsored since 1979 by the National Endowment for the Humanities, as well as the American Council of Learned Societies, Union Académique Internationale, Iran Heritage Foundation, and many other charitable foundations, philanthropic families and individuals.[22]

On March 25, 2007, the Associated Press released a news report about Encyclopædia Iranica, claiming that it is "U.S.-backed".[23] Encyclopædia Iranica published an official response, saying the report was "inaccurate and libelous", that while the National Endowment for the Humanities supports the encyclopedia, the Endowment is "an independent federal agency whose many projects are reviewed and decided upon by independent panels of scholars", not the U.S. Government, and that only a third of the encyclopedia's budget is supplied by the Endowment, not half, as the Associated Press had claimed.[24]