Nan Ni

Nan Ni is a PhD Candidate at SOAS, University of London. Under the supervision of Professor Almut Hintze and Professor Nicholas Sims-Williams, her doctoral research focuses on Sogdian dhāraṇīs excavated along the Silk Road, analysing their textual, linguistic, and cultural dimensions. 

Her PhD thesis offers a comprehensive study of Sogdian dhāraṇī texts through transliteration, translation, and etymological investigation. It proceeds comparatively, reading Sogdian materials alongside parallel textual traditions in Chinese, Sanskrit, and Tibetan etc., in order to reconstruct networks of textual transmission and ritual practice across the Silk Road. By placing these manuscripts within a broader historical frame by mobilising epigraphic evidence, visual source, and administrative or historiographical records, her research aims to move from micro-level textual problems to macro-level historical questions about community formation, multilingual religious life, and the mechanisms by which ritual technologies circulated across Tang-period Eurasia. 

She has a genuine research interest in Indo-Iranian philology, with particular emphasis on excavated manuscripts from the historic Silk Road, especially those discovered at Dunhuang and Turfan. Through close engagement with textual evidence, she seeks to advance understanding of the multilingual and multi-ethnic societies that characterised the Silk Road during the first millennium CE. In 2023, she was selected as a grantee of the UNESCO Silk Roads Youth Grant Scheme.

Dunhuang Studies; Turfan Studies; Silk Road History and Culture; Manuscript Studies; Indo-Iranian Languages