Ahmad Al-Jallad
is a philologist, epigraphist, and historian of language. His work focuses on the languages and writing systems of pre-Islamic Arabia and the ancient Near East.
Josephine van den Bent
is lecturer and postdoctoral researcher in the history department of Radboud University Nijmegen, investigating water management in premodern Iraqi cities (c. 700–1500) as part of the project “Source of Life,” funded by the Dutch Research Council. Her PhD thesis (University of Amsterdam, 2020) analyzed the representation of the Mongols in the Mamluk Sultanate of Egypt and Syria, c. 1250–1350. Her research interests include ethnic stereotyping, urban organization, and in general the social and cultural history of the premodern Middle East.
Kevin van Bladel
is a Professor of Near Eastern Languages & Civilizations at Yale University. He is the author of The Arabic Hermes (2009) and From Sasanian Mandaeans to Sabians of the Marshes (2017), as well as many articles on the classical traditions of western Asia and the language communities of the Near East in the first millennium ce.
Constanza Cordoni
is the Jewish studies research fellow at the Institute for Medieval Research of the Austrian Academy of the Sciences in Vienna and lecturer at the Department of Jewish Studies of the University of Vienna. She was formerly a postdoctoral researcher at Utrecht University. Her research focuses on rabbinic literature of late antiquity and the early Middle Ages, the literature of formative Judaism. She is especially interested in questions of historical hermeneutics and narratology. She is co-editor of the Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht series Poetics, Exegesis, and Narratology.
Floris van den Eijnde
is director of Ancient, Medieval, and Renaissance Studies and lecturer and researcher of Ancient History at the department of History and Art History of Utrecht University. He leads the uu research group Sacrality and the Greek Polis, is founder and co-director of the Dutch research group Cultural Interactions
Harald Motzki
(1948–2019) studied in Bonn, Paris, and Cologne and wrote his Habilitation in Hamburg, where in 1989 and 1990 he was the substitute professor of Islamwissenschaft. From 1991 to 2011 he worked at Radboud University Nijmegen, first as associate professor and from 2001 as professor of the Methodology of Research in Islamic Studies. He has written more than a hundred books and articles.
Petra M. Sijpesteijn
is professor of Arabic at Leiden University. Currently she is a senior research fellow at the Historisches Kolleg in Munich. She is the principal investigator of an international research project entitled “Embedding Conquest: Naturalising Muslim Rule in the Early Islamic Empire (600–1000),” funded by the European Research Council.
Joanita Vroom
is professor of the Archaeology of Medieval and Early Modern Eurasia at the Faculty of Archaeology, Leiden University, specializing in medieval and post-medieval archaeology in the eastern Mediterranean and the Near East (including the Byzantine, Islamic, Crusader, and Ottoman periods). She takes a particular interest in the social-economic (production and distribution) and cultural aspects (cuisine and eating habits) of ceramics in these societies and is series editor of the Medieval and Post-Medieval Mediterranean Archaeology Series (mpmas) at Brepols Publishers (Turnhout). For her publications, see:
Peter Webb
is a university lecturer in Arabic Literature and Culture at Leiden University. His research investigates the evolution of Arab identity and Muslim narratives of pre-Islamic history as developed in pre-modern Middle Eastern writings. Peter is the author of Imagining the Arabs: Arab Identity and the Rise of Islam (Edinburgh, 2016), and the editor and translator of several classical Arabic texts for the nyp Press Library of Arabic Literature and Brill’s
Johan Weststeijn
studies the parallels between Greek myth and Arabic accounts of the Basus War. From 1992 to 2019 he was a student and guest researcher at the Department of Arabic and Islamic Studies of the University of Amsterdam.
Clare Wilde
(ab, Princeton; Licentiate, Pontifical Institute for the Study of Arabic and Islam; PhD, cua) is the author of Approaches to the Qurʾan in Early Christian Arabic Texts (Academica, 2014). She is a specialist in the history of Arabophone Christianity and early Christian-Muslim relations, on which themes she has written various articles. She was the research associate for the first edition of Brill’s Encyclopaedia of the Qurʾan and has taught at Georgetown University, the University of Auckland, and the University of Groningen.