Michael Stausberg

Book reviews occupy a paradoxical position in academic scholarship: epistemologically significant yet routinely undertheorized, institutionally undervalued yet widely practiced. This article argues that the genre deserves sustained scholarly reflection on four grounds. First, it examines the epistemological and disciplinary functions of book reviews, showing how the genre operates as a filtering mechanism, a vehicle for critical appreciation, and a means of contextualizing scholarship within living intellectual debates. Second, it traces the history of reviewing from the founding of Le Journal des Sçavans in 1665, when the tension between objective presentation and subjective evaluation was already politically charged, through to the present, when AI-generated reviews pose new questions about voice, judgment, and authorial presence. Third, it argues that book reviews are a primary mechanism through which academic disciplines constitute and reproduce themselves. Fourth, it makes the case that book reviews represent a strategic and underexploited resource for early-career scholars. Taken together, these arguments suggest that the book review is not a peripheral or parasitic genre but a constitutive one — central to how academic disciplines evaluate knowledge, form community, and reproduce themselves across generations of scholars.

The Oxford Handbook of the Study of Religions is a comprehensive and authoritative survey of the academic study of religions. Written by leading experts in the field, the volume offers an interdisciplinary survey of religious studies. Presented in seven parts, the Handbook examines conceptual issues of religion, theoretical approaches, modes, environments, topics, and an overview of the history of the discipline. Each chapter references at least two different religions, often providing fresh and innovative perspectives on key issues.

Zoroastrianism, one of the three recognized religious minorities in the Islamic Republic, can claim a specific linkage with Iran since the Avestan Vendidād and its other primary religious documents were written in Iranian languages and its history has for the most part unfolded in Iran. The term Aryan is used in inscriptions by the Achaemenian king Darius I as a way to gloss the name of the deity Ahura Mazdā. In the Sasanian period, Iran became the name of the empire. Zoroastrian literature written under Islamic rule, reaffirms the idea of a unity between kingship and religion, but transposes its realization into the eschatological future. After centuries of decline and discrimination, twentieth-century modernization entailed the prospect of societal reintegration for Zoroastrians; an unachieved hope under the Pahlavis, this prospect has become even more remote under the political conditions imposed by the Islamic Republic, where Zoroastrians now use the vocabulary of martyrdom to express their commitment to their homeland.