Professor Dr. Sabine Schmidtke

Born in Germany, Schmidtke received a B.A. from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem (1986), an M.A. from the School of Oriental and African Studies in London (1987) and a D.Phil. from the University of Oxford (1990). From 1991 to 1999, she was a diplomat at the German Foreign Office. Schmidtke served as Lecturer in Islamic Studies at the Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität in Bonn from 1997 to 1999, where she also received her Habilitation (1999). She was Visiting Professor of Islamic Studies at the Freie Universität Berlin from 1999 to 2001, after which time she became Professor. In 2014, she has been appointed to faculty at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton. Schmidtke and her work have been recognized by numerous awards and fellowships. In 2002, Schmidtke received the World Prize for the Book of the Year of the Islamic Republic of Iran. She also was awarded the Prize for Scholarly Achievement in the Study of Twelver Shīʿism conferred by the Written Heritage Research Centre (2006) and the Dahlem Research School Award for Excellent Supervision (2011).

Professor Sarah Stroumsa PhD

Haifa-born Professor Sarah Stroumsa began her academic career at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in 1977, and then went on to study in Paris. She completed her Ph.D. with honors at the Hebrew University in 1984, where she held the Alice and Jack Ormut Chair in Arabic Studies in the department of Arabic language and literature and the department of Jewish thought. Her field of expertise is philosophy and religious thought in the medieval Islamic world, with a focus on the intellectual exchange between Jewish and Muslim religious thinkers. She also used to be director of the Friedberg Genizah Projects’ ‘Philosophy, Theology and Polemics in the Genizah’ group and is on the steering committee of ‘Intellectual Encounters: Philosophy and Science in the World of Medieval Islam’. In 2003, she was appointed deputy rector and in 2008 rector of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

Professor Sari Nusseibeh PhD

Sari Nusseibeh is Professor of Islamic and Political Philosophy and was President of Al-Quds University, East Jerusalem from 1995 until September 2014. Born in Damascus in 1949, he was brought up in Jerusalem and later educated both in the UK (Oxford, PPE) and Harvard (Islamic Philosophy), earning his PhD in 1978. Over the years, Nusseibeh received several recognitions and awards, including, an Honorary Doctorate from Leuven University in Belgium, in 2009. In 1994-1995 he was elected Fellow of the Woodrow Wilson Center for International Scholars in Washington D.C. In 2001 he was Visiting Fellow at Balliol College, Oxford. In 2004-2005, he was the Rita Hauser Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Harvard. In 2007 he became Fellow at the Baker Institute for Public Policy at Rice University. Nusseibeh’s presentations at international fora include the much-acclaimed Tanner Lectureship (Harvard University, 2008), and the Multatuli Lecture (Leuven, 2009).

Principal Investigator

Prof. Dr. Konrad Hirschler

Professor Dr. Konrad Hirschler is a faculty member of the Insitute of Islamic studies at Freie Universität Berlin. As a historian of the medieval Middle East he works in particular on Egypt and Syria between c. 1100 and 1500. In his research and teaching he has have shifted over the years between five principal themes: historiography, the history of reading and libraries, methodological issues linked to documentary sources and archives, crusades, and finally the interplay between marginal groups and mainstream society. His monographies include works on Medieval Damascus as well as a mayor study of reading practices in the medieval arabic world.