Richard N. Frye
Biographies
                                                     Detailed Biography

Biography of Richard Frye by Professor Shapur Shahbazi of Oregon State University
From the Bulletin of the Asia Institute, 1990

              
                                                        A Brief Biography


                                                      Richard Nelson Frye


Appropriately referred to as “dean of the world’s Iranists” by other scholars, Richard
Nelson Frye of Harvard University has researched and taught the cultural history of Iran,
Central Asia and the Near East for over six decades and needs little introduction to those
familiar with the field.  His work has covered the spectrum of Iranian studies and the
history of Iran and related cultures across the centuries, with  the relevant extant sources
and documents in multiple living and extinct languages ranging from Avestan and Old
Persian to Sogdian, to present modern Iranian languages. He has lived among the people
of Iran, and the countries possessed of Iranian culture which have become politically
detached from Iran in the vicissitudes of the past few centuries, ranging from those
flanking Iran and the Caspian Sea to Central Asia, including former southern Soviet
republics, to which he has often referred collectively as Greater Iran, or Iran of the
Exterior.  

Early in his career, the editor and compiler of the monumental, encyclopedic Persian
dictionary, Dehkhoda, gave him the honorific Irandoost, or Iranophile, which has since
adorned the doorway to his office at Harvard.   

Richard Frye was Director of the Asia Institute in Shiraz for five years, as successor to
Arthur Upham Pope, editor of Survey of Persian Art. where he lived with his family.  In
addition he has lived, taught and conducted research and studies in Germany and other
European countries, Afghanistan, Tajikistan and a number of other Middle Eastern and
Central Asian states. He is fluent in Farsi, Turkish, Arabic and several European languages.
He has lectured in Farsi in recent years in universities in Tehran and Isfahan, advocating
the separation of religion and state and expounding the underlying historical basis for this
separation from the foundation of the Iranian state, ca. 550 BC, to the present.

He received his PhD in history and philology from Harvard in 1946, with his thesis on
Narshakhi’s History of Bokhara.  He joined the Harvard faculty in 1948 and  later became
Agha Khan Professor of Iranian Studies.  He founded the Center for Middle Eastern Studies
(CMES) at Harvard.  His books and articles on Iranian history and culture have endured as
references on the subject.  A full bibliography entails an article in itself, but notable among
his books are Iran (1953), Persia (1968), The Heritage of Persia (1963), The Golden Age of
Persia (1975),  History of Ancient Iran (1984), The Heritage of Central Asia (1996), Greater
Iran (memoirs, 2005), and History of Bukhara (2007).

For further information the reader may refer to the biography by another former student,
Professor Shapur Shahbazi of Oregon State University, 1990, and to the Wikipedia article :  
Richard Nelson Frye