Notes on Contributors
Mehmetcan Akpınar
is a Postdoctoral Fellow in the research group “Normativity of the Qurʾān” at the Center for Islamic Theology and a Research Fellow (Habilitand) at the Department of Oriental and Islamic Studies at the University of Tübingen, where he researches and teaches early Islamic history and Islamic intellectual history. He received his PhD from the University of Chicago (2016). His dissertation entitled Narrative Representations of Abu Bakr in the 2nd/8th Century, one of the first scientific monographs on Abū Bakr (d. 634), critically investigates the Islamic narrative material on the first caliph.
Nuha Alshaar
is Associate Professor at the American University of Sharjah and Senior Research Associate at the Institute of Ismaili Studies in London. She received her PhD from the University of Cambridge (2009) and has taught at various academic institutions, including the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS). Her publications include Sources and Approaches across Disciplines in Near Eastern Studies (co-editor, 2013), Ethics in Islam. Friendship in the Political Thought of al-Tawḥīdī and his Contemporaries (2015) and On God and the World. An Arabic Critical Edition and English Translation of Epistles 49-51 (co-authored, 2019).
Pavel Basharin
is Assistant Professor in the Department of the Modern East and director of the Center for Iranian Studies at the Russian State University for the Humanities in Moscow. He received his PhD from the People’s Friendship University in Moscow under the supervision of Prof. Maytham al-Jannabi (2007). His research interests include history and philosophy of Islamic mysticism, Islamic demonology, Arabic and Persian manuscripts, pre-Islamic religions in Iran and comparative linguistics. He authored over 150 scientific publications.
David Bennett
currently with the Institute of Ismaili Studies in London, was a research associate with the Representation and Reality programme at the University of Gothenburg from 2014 to 2019. He specializes in Islamic philosophy and theology. He has published on atomism, concepts, dreams, heresiography and spirit in the Arabic tradition. With Juhana Toivanen, he edited Philosophical Problems in Sense Perception (2020). He has several chapters in the three-volume Forms and Representation in the Aristotelian Tradition (forthcoming).
Michal Biran
is the Max and Sophie Mydans Foundation Professor in the Humanities and director of the Institute of Asian and African Studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, as well as a member of the Israel Academy of Science and Humanities. She is a historian of the medieval Islamic World and imperial China, and has published extensively on Mongol and pre-Mongol Central Asia, cross-cultural contacts between China, nomadic empires and the Muslim World and Ilkhanid Baghdād. Autor or editor of 12 books and volumes and dozens of articles, together with Hodong Kim she has recently completed editing The Cambridge History of the Mongol Empire (forthcoming).
Richard W. Bulliet
is Professor Emeritus of History at Columbia University. Educated at Harvard, he taught at Harvard and the University of California, Berkeley before joining the Columbia faculty where he taught for 39 years. His fields of interest include medieval Islamic history, the history of transportation, the history of human-animal relations and world history. His books on Islamic history include Conversion to Islam in the Medieval Period (1979), Islam. The View from the Edge (1994) and Cotton, Climate, and Camels in Early Islamic Iran (2009).
Kirill Dmitriev
is Lecturer in Arabic at the University of St Andrews, UK. His research focuses on the study of classical Arabic language and literature. He is the co-editor of Insatiable Appetite. Food as Cultural Signifier in the Middle East and Beyond (2019) and “Passed around by a Crescent”. Wine Poetry in the Literary Traditions of the Islamic World (forthcoming 2022). He is the founding member of the Arab-German Young Academy of Sciences and Humanities (AGYA) and the recipient of the Friedrich Wilhelm Bessel Research Award by the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation.
Desmond Durkin-Meisterernst
is Honorarprofessor at the Institute for Iranian Studies at the Freie Universität Berlin (since 2010). He got his PhD in Indoeuropean linguistics, Indology and Old Oriental Philology from the University of Münster (1991) and received his Habilitation and venia legendi in Indoeuropean Linguistics from the same institution in 2012. Since 2001, he was Research Assistant at the Turfan Studies Project at the Berlin-Brandenburgische Akademie der Wissenschaften, becoming the project’s director from 2007-2015. Since 2018 he is in part-time retirement.
Hend Gilli-Elewy
is a professor in the Interdisciplinary General Education Department at California State Polytechnic University, Pomona. She holds a PhD in Islamic Studies from the University of Cologne. Her research and scholarly interests include social, historical and religious aspects of the early and medieval Islamic World, the Mongol Ilkhanids and the history of Baghdād and Iraq. Her publications include: Al-Ḥawādiṯ al-ǧāmiʿa. A Contemporary Account on the Mongol Conquest of Baghdad, 656/1258, in: Arabica 58 (2011), 353-371 and Bagdad nach dem Fall des Kalifats. Die Geschichte einer ilkhanischen Provinz (1258-1335) (2000).
Beatrice Gruendler
(PhD Harvard University, 1995), formerly Professor at Yale University (1996-2014), is Professor of Arabic at the Freie Universität Berlin. Her areas of research include Arabic paleography, classical Arabic poetry and its social context, the integration of modern literary theory into the study of Near Eastern literatures and early Arabic book-culture. She is the author of The Development of the Arabic Scripts. From the Nabatean Era to the First Islamic Century (1993, Arabic translation 2004), The Life and Times of Abū Tammām (Akhbār Abī Tammām) by Abū Bakr Muhammad ibn Yaḥyā al-Ṣūlī (2015) and The Rise of the Arabic Book (2020).
Sebastian Günther
is Professor and Chair of Arabic and Islamic Studies at the University of Göttingen. He received his PhD from Martin Luther University, Halle-Wittenberg (1989). From 1998 to 2008 he was assistant and Associate Professor of Arabic language and literature at the University of Toronto. A specialist in Islamic thought, Arabic belles-lettres and classical Muslim theories of education, Günther’s recent publications include the edited volumes Knowledge and Education in Classical Islam. Religious Learning between Continuity and Change (2020) and Islamic Ethics as Educational Discourse. Thought and Impact of the Classical Muslim Thinker Miskawayh (d. 1030) (2021, with Yassir El Jamouhi).
Olof Heilo
is director of the Swedish Research Institute in Istanbul. He received his PhD from the Institute of Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies at the University of Vienna (2010) and taught history at the Center for Middle Eastern Studies in Lund between 2012 and 2017. He is the author of Eastern Rome and the Rise of Islam. History and Prophecy (2016) and co-editor of various academic and popular volumes on the history and reception of empires from the ancient to the Modern period.
Damien Janos
(PhD McGill University, 2009) is Assistant Professor at the University of Montreal, Canada, and is presently conducting a Humboldt Fellowship for Experienced Researchers at the LMU in Munich (2021-2022). He has published extensively on the metaphysics and cosmology of al-Fārābī and Avicenna and on the history of Arabic philosophy. His ongoing projects focus on unity and multiplicity in Avicenna’s metaphysics and on the Arabic Christian philosophers of the Baghdād School.
Bernard O’Kane
is Professor of Islamic Art and Architecture at the American University in Cairo, where he has been teaching since 1980. He has also been a visiting professor at Harvard University and the University of California at Berkeley. He is the author of eleven books, among the most recent being Studies in Persian Architecture (2021) and Mosques. The 100 Most Iconic Islamic Houses of Worship (2019).
Christopher Melchert
got a bachelor’s degree at the University of California at Santa Cruz (1977), a master’s at Princeton University (1983) and a doctorate at the University of Pennsylvania (1992), all in History. He has taught since 2000 at Oxford University. He has published over 70 articles in journals and edited collections as well as these books: The Formation of the Sunni Schools of Law, Ninth-Tenth Centuries CE (1997), Ahmad ibn Hanbal (2006) and Before Sufism. Early Islamic Renunciant Piety (2020).
Michael G. Morony
is a retired Professor Emeritus of history at the University of California, Los Angeles. He received his PhD from U.C.L.A. (1972) and has taught there from 1974 to 2020. His research and publications have focused on the transition from Late Antiquity to early Islam, historiography and social and economic history. His major publications include Iraq after the Muslim Conquest (1983), Universality in Islamic Thought. Rationalism, Science and Religious Belief (2014) and The Early Islamic Mining Boom, in: JESHO 62 (2019), 166-221.
Klaus Oschema
is Professor of Medieval History at the Ruhr-University Bochum. He received his PhD from TU Dresden and the EPHE Paris (2004) and his habilitation from Heidelberg University (2012). Between 2009 and 2014 he was a member of the German Young Academy, in 2016-2017 he was Gerda Henkel Member of the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, NJ (USA). His research focuses on late medieval court culture and nobility (especially Burgundy and France), medieval concepts of socialization and their performative counterparts and large-scale concepts of world order in the Middle Ages. His publications include Bilder von Europa im Mittelalter (2013) and he is the co-editor of Zukunft im Mittelalter (2021).
Letizia Osti
is Associate Professor in Arabic Language and Literature at the Università degli Studi di Milano. She received her PhD from the University of St Andrews (2002). Her work focuses on classical Arabic prose and narrative techniques in biographical collections, historiography, literature and intersections thereof. Her publications include Crisis and Continuity at the Abbasid Court. Formal and Informal Politics in the Caliphate of al-Muqtadir (co-authored, 2013) and History and Memory in the Abbasid Caliphate. Writing the Past in Medieval Arabic Literature (2022).
Parvaneh Pourshariati
has been an Associate Professor of History at the New York City College of Technology/CUNY since 2014. Before she taught at Ohio State University since 2000. An Honorary Professor at the Ferdowsi University of Mashhad, she specializes on the late antique and medieval history of Western Asia, with a concentration on the Iranian oikumene. She received various fellowships, e.g. from the American Association of University Women, the Social Science Research Council, the Persian Heritage Foundation and the Lady Davis Fellowship (University of Jerusalem) and published, among others, Decline and Fall of the Sasanian Empire (2011).
Jens Scheiner
is Professor of Islamic Studies at the Georg-August-Universität Göttingen. He received his PhD from Radboud Universiteit in Nijmegen (2009). Between 2010 and 2016 he was Junior Professor at the Courant Research Center “Education and Religion” (EDRIS) at the University of Göttingen. His research focuses on early Islamic political and cultural history in its late antique context, Arabic historiography and Ḥadīth Studies, in particular the Isnād-cum-Matn Analysis. He is co-editor of the book series Studies in Late Antiquity and Early Islam (now Berlin) and his publications include The Place to Go. Contexts of Learning in Baghdād, 750-1000 CE. (co-editor, 2014) and Rediscovering al-Azdī and the Futūḥ al-Shām Narrative (2022).
Angela Schottenhammer (蕭婷 )
is Professor of Chinese Middle Period & Early Modern World History at KU Leuven. She obtained her PhD in 1993 from Würzburg University (M.A. 1989) and her Habilitation from LMU Munich University (2000). She is director of the Crossroads Research Center, chief editor of the academic journal Crossroads and of two book series (Crossroads – History of Interactions across the Silk Routes; East Asian Maritime History) and has widely published on Chinese history, archaeology, science & technology and culture, and on China’s and Asia’s increasing worldwide integration, through both maritime and overland routes.
Y. Zvi Stampfer
is head of the Research Authority of Orot-Israel College, Israel, and fellow at the Herbert D. Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies, University of Pennsylvania (2022). He also serves as an honorary secretary of Mekitze-Nirdamim, the society for publication of ancient Hebrew manuscripts. He received his PhD from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem (2005). Between 2014 and 2016 he was a research associate at the Genizah Research Unit at Cambridge University. His research focuses on comparative study of Jewish (halakhah) and Islamic (sharīʿa) religious law, the Judeo-Arabic culture and literature in the medieval Islamic World, as well as Cairo Genizah documents.
Johannes Thomann
is a visiting scholar at the Institute of Asian and Oriental Studies (IAOS) of the University of Zurich. He received his PhD from the same university (1992), where he was a research associate at the Orientalisches Seminar and the IAOS between 1992 and 2020. His research focuses on the sciences in the pre-Modern Islamicate World, especially on astronomy and astrology. Among his latest publications are Reverse Engineering Applied to Ephemerides. Analysis and Edition of the Arabic Ephemeris (in: Husson, M. [ed.], Editing and Analysing Numerical Tables, Turnhout 2021) and Ibn Sahl al-Ṣāwī’s Description of an Instrument with a Gear Mechanism, in: ZGAIW 23 (2021).
Isabel Toral
is Professor of for Arabic studies at FU Berlin. She received her PhD from the University of Tübingen (1997) and her habilitation from Freie Universität Berlin (2008). Between 1997 and 2018 she had numerous research positions in Freiburg, Berlin, London, Göttingen and Mainz. Her main research fields are the Near East in Late Antiquity, cultural history, translation in the Islamicate World and advice literature and adab in classical Islam. Her publications include Al-Ḥīra. (2014), Factual Narrative in Medieval Arabic Literature, in: Fludernik, M. et al. (eds.), Narrative Factuality, Berlin 2019 and Justice and Good Administration in Medieval Islam, in: Leppin, H. et al. (eds.), The Good Christian Ruler in the First Millenium, Berlin 2021.
Vanessa van Renterghem
is a historian of the medieval Middle East. She is Associate Professor of Islamic medieval history at Inalco (Institut National des Langues et Civilisations Orientales, Paris). A former student of École normale supérieure, she received her PhD from the Université Paris 1 – Sorbonne (2004) and spent 9 years in the Middle East (Syria, Lebanon, Iran). Her research focuses on medieval Iraq, especially the social and urban history of Baghdād during the 11th and 12th centuries. Besides many articles, she published Les élites bagdadiennes au temps des Seldjoukides. Étude d’histoire sociale (2015).