Federico Dragoni is a postdoc at the Leiden University Centre for Linguistics.

More information about Federico Dragoni

Profile

I specialize in Iranian and Central Asian languages, focusing on the pre-Islamic Tarim Basin in today’s Xinjiang Uyghur autonomous region in Northwest China. I am fascinated by ancient phenomena of linguistic exchange along the Silk Road and their repercussions on ancient and modern societies. I investigate these exchange networks using the tools of historical linguistics, (historical) language contact, philology, and (art) history.

I earned my BA (2014) and MA (2016) in Iranian Studies from Sapienza University of Rome and Freie Universität Berlin, where I studied Iranian philology, Modern Persian, Arabic, and Sanskrit and specialized in (Eastern) Middle Iranian languages, with a research focus on Khotanese, Sogdian, and Middle Persian. 

In 2022, I earned a PhD in Linguistics from Leiden University as a member of the NWO-funded project “Tracking the Tocharians” under the guidance of Prof. M. Peyrot. My thesis demonstrated that the influence of Khotanese and Tumshuqese on Tocharian was much stronger than previously thought. This work has recently been awarded the first prize of the Society for Indo-European Studies and the Award for Best PhD Dissertation in Iranian Studies of the Societas Iranologica Europaea (SIE). A revised version of this work has been published as a monograph in the series Beiträge zur Iranistik (Reichert) and is available Open Access. 

Studies 

2022 PhD Linguistics, Leiden University 

2016 MA Iranistik, Freie Universität Berlin 

2014 BA Oriental Languages and Cultures, Sapienza University of Rome 

2009 MA Music (Clarinet), Conservatory G. Verdi, Milan

Employment

2022-present Postdoc, Leiden University Centre for Linguistics

2017-2021 PhD employee (promovendus), Leiden University Centre for Linguistics

2015-2017 Student assistant at the Institute for Iranian Studies, Freie Universität Berlin

Publications