Richard Nelson Frye is an American scholar of Iranic and Central Asian Studies, and Aga Khan Professor Emeritus of Iranian Studies at Harvard University. His professional areas of interest are Iranian philology, and the history of Iran and Central Asia before 1000 CE. Born in Birmingham, Alabama to a family of immigrants from Sweden, "Freij" has four children, his second marriage being to an Iranian-Assyrian scholar, Dr. Eden Naby, from Urmia, Iran who teaches at Columbia University. He speaks fluent Russian, German, Arabic, Persian, Pashto, French, Uzbek, and Turkish, and has extensive... knowledge of Avestan, Pahlavi, Sogdian, and other Iranian languages and dialects, both extinct and current. Frye first attended the University of Illinois, where he received an BA in history and philosophy in 1939. He received his MA from Harvard University in 1940 and his PhD from Harvard in 1946, in Asiatic history. Frye served with the Office of Strategic Services during World War II. He was stationed in Afghanistan and traveled extensively in the Middle East, Central Asia, and South Asia. He returned to Harvard to teach.
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