Founded in 1983 in Rome, Societas Iranologica Europaea (SIE) is a global academic association in Iranian Studies that unites members from European and non-European countries.
SIE aims to promote, develop, and support Ancient, Middle, and Modern Iranian Studies.
Among the world's largest Iranian Studies conferences is the European Conference of Iranian Studies (ECIS), held every four years and organized by the Societas Iranologica Europaea (SIE).
The founders established the Societas Iranologica Europaea in 1983 during the First European Colloquium of Iranology. After founding the SIE no more conferences titled European Colloquium of Iranology were held, and in 1987 SIE organized the first European Conference of Iranian Studies (ECIS). Since 1987 ECIS happens regularly.
Unlike Iranian Studies Conferences of the Association for Iranian Studies (AIS) and Iranian Studies Conventions of the Association for the Study of Persianate Societies (ASPS), the European Conference of Iranian Studies lacks a website that would present all organized conferences.
The conference programs of ECIS 1 until ECIS 6 are not available online on the AIS website or any other resource. Unlike above mentioned two Iranian Studies conferences, the European Conference of Iranian Studies creates a separate website for each year's conference. Although the primary organizer of ECIS, the AIS, has a website for unknown reasons, instead of strengthening its website with information about each conference, AIS creates and maintains a new one on a new domain or hosts the conference website on institution domains that host the conference.
Hosting conference information on other domains is a dangerous practice because maintaining a new website for each conference is a difficult task, the main organizer will not have access to the content of the conference that was available on the host institution's website, and after several years these websites and all contents will most probably be lost. It has already happened with the 8th European Conference of Iranian Studies in St. Petersburg. The website of the conference, although it is operating, no more preserves the conference program file, and many other materials are no more downloadable and most probably are lost.
Below we present the list of European Conference of Iranian Studies with dates and venue.
1987 - First European Conference of Iranian Studies, Turin, Italy
1991 - Second European Conference of Iranian Studies, Bamberg, Germany
1995 - Third European Conference of Iranian Studies, Wiesbaden, Germany
1999 - Forth European Conference of Iranian Studies, Paris, France
2003 - Fifth European Conference of Iranian Studies, Ravenna, Italy
2007 - Sixth European Conference of Iranian Studies, Vienna, Austria
2011 - Seventh European Conference of Iranian Studies, Cracow, Poland
2015 - Eighth European Conference of Iranian Studies, St. Petersburg, Russia
2019 - Ninth European Conference of Iranian Studies, Berlin, Germany
As mentioned above, information about the upcoming "European Conference of Iranian Studies" will be difficult to find on the Societas Iranologica Europaea's official website. The SIE website will announce that the new conference call for papers will be available on another website.
Each SIE conference will be announced several months before the deadline via websites and mailing lists.
After the abstracts are received, each SIE conference's organizing committee will prepare the participants' final list and share the preliminary program with the participants. In some cases, the preliminary program will also appear on the website and be substituted with the program's final version later.
Unlike other Iranian Studies conferences, it seems that the European Conference of Iranian Studies program is not divided into panels. It is hard to navigate through the program (only programs of 2 previous conferences are available) and find conference talks organized inside panels.
Nevertheless, the European Conference of Iranian Studies is a primary event in Iranian Studies and a necessary convention for students and scholars to participate, share advancements in research, gain valuable insights, and most importantly, extend the network in Iranian Studies.