Garnik Asatrian


Garnik S. Asatrian is an Iranian-born Armenian professor who studies and teaches Kurdish culture at Yerevan State University in Yerevan, Armenia.
Asatrian became well-known for his extensive research in the field of the study of Kurdish tribal and linguistic tradition and also for the establishment of the Center of Contemporary Kurdish Studies.

Biography

Asatrian was born on March 7, 1953 in Tehran, and immigrated to Yerevan in 1968. In 1976, he graduated from the Department of Kurdish Studies at the Iranian Studies Branch of Yerevan State University.
From 1977 to 1986, he was a PhD student and then a senior lecturer at the Institute of Oriental Studies, Academy of Soviet Sciences in Leningrad in the field of ancient Iranian culture and languages. Asatrian earned a doctorate from the University of Leningrad in 1984 and an excellent doctorate in 1990 from the Soviet Academy of Sciences in Moscow.
He has drawn together 11 books and more than 125 scientific articles in Armenian, Russian, English, German, French, Turkish, and Kurdish languages. From 1985–1999 he was a professor at the University of Copenhagen and participated in various international conferences in Berlin, Moscow, Copenhagen, Oslo, Aarhus, New York, London, Washington, Tehran, and Paris.
One of the best and effective works of Asatrian is "The Cultural Dictionary of Persian Etymology", which is written in Persian and contains all the original Iranian words with transcription. He is the founder of two magazines, Irannameh and Acta Kurdica.

Research areas