Prof. Dr. Maribel Fierro, Centro de Ciencias Humanas y Sociales, Madrid
Lecturer IEIW 2014/15, 2015/16

Maribel Fierro is a Research Professor at the Instituto de Lenguas y Culturas del Mediterráneo y Oriente Próximo in Madrid, Spain. She earned her Ph.D. working on Semitic Philology in 1985 at Universidad Compultense, Madrid, after which she hold different academic positions, including Directeur d’études associé at the Centre de Recherches Historiques, Paris and Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem as part of the Research Group Law and State in Classical Islam. Furthermore, she directed several Research Projects, including Knowledge, heresy and political culture in the Islamic West (eighth-fifteenth centuries) and Violencia y casting en sociedades islámicas pre-modernas (al-Andalus y el Magreb). Among her latest publications are „The Almohad revolution“, „Politics and religion in the Islamic West during the twelfth-thirteenth centuries“, „Abdarramán III y el califato omega de Córdoba“ and „Sabios y santos musulmanes de Algeciras“.

Prof. Dr. Carlos Fraenkel, McGill University, Montréal
Lecturer IEIW 2013/14

Carlos Fraenkel is an associate professor at McGill University in Montréal, jointly appointed in the departments of philosophy and Jewish studies. He holds a William Dawson Scholarship (2004 to 2014) which is McGill’s equivalent to a Junior Canada Research Chair. From October 2013 he will also take up an appointment at Oxford to teach philosophy and religion as the Professor of the Study of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. He held various visiting positions, including a semester at al-Quds University, the Palestinian University in Jerusalem, where he co-taught a seminar with Sari Nusseibeh in 2006. Fraenkel did most of his undergraduate and graduate work at the Freie Universität Berlin and The Hebrew University in Jerusalem, completing his PhD in 2000. He works on various issues spanning ancient philosophy, medieval philosophy (mainly Jewish and Islamic) and early modern philosophy (mainly Spinoza). He also has an interest in political philosophy, in particular in questions related to cultural difference, identity, and autonomy. His publications include two monographs: From Maimonides to Samuel ibn Tibbon: The Transformation of the Dalâlat al-Hâ’irîn into the Moreh ha-Nevukhim, Jerusalem: The Hebrew University Magnes Press, 2007 [Hebrew] and Philosophical Religions from Plato to Spinoza: Reason, Religion, and Autonomy, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012. For more information, please consult his website: www.carlosfraenkel.com

Prof. Dr. Konrad Hirschler, Freie Universität Berlin
Guest speaker

Konrad Hirschler is Professor of Islamic Studies at the Freie Universität Berlin since 2016 and was previously Professor of Middle Eastern History at SOAS (University of London). His research focuses on Egypt and Syria in the Ayyubid and Mamluk periods (c. 1200-1500) with a focus on social and cultural history. Over the last years, he has primarily worked on the history of reading, of the book and of libraries in the Syrian lands. Konrad Hirschler is the author of, amongst others, Medieval Damascus: Plurality and Diversity in an Arabic Library (2016) and The Written Word in the Medieval Arabic Lands: A Social and Cultural History of Reading Practices (2012).

Prof. em. Dr. Guy Stroumsa, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem
Guest speaker

Guy G. Stroumsa is Martin Buber Professor Emeritus of Comparative Religion, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem and Professor Emeritus of the Study of the Abrahamic Religions, and Emeritus Fellow of Lady Margaret Hall, University of Oxford. He is a Member of the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities and holds an honorary doctorate from the University of Zurich. He is a laureate of the Humboldt Research Award, and a Chevalier de l’Ordre du Mérite. Further he is, together with Sarah Stroumsa, the recipient of the Leopold-Lucas-Preis for 2018.
Author of fourteen books and more than one hundred and thirty articles, editor or co-editor of twenty-one books. Among his recent publications: The Scriptural Universe of Ancient Christianity (Cambridge, Mass, 2016), The Making of the Abrahamic Religions in Late Antiquity (Oxford, 2015), A New Science: the Discovery of Religion in the Age of Reason (Cambridge, Mass., 2010), and The End of Sacrifice: Religious Transformations of Late Antiquity (Chicago, 2009; paperback 2012; Original French edition, 2005; also Italian, German and Hebrew translations).

Prof. em. Dr. Sarah Stroumsa, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem
Advisory Board

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.
She is, together with Guy Stroumsa, the recipient of the Leopold-Lucas-Preis for 2018.

Prof. em. Dr. Sara Sviri, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem
Lecturer 2016/17

Since 2002, and now in her retirement, Sara Sviri has been affiliated as a distinguished visiting professor to the Department of Arabic and the Department of Comparative Religions at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Formerly, while residing in England, she was teaching at the Department of Hebrew and Jewish Studies at University College London and at the University of Oxford. Her fields of study are Islamic mysticism (Sufism), mystical philosophy, mystical psychology, Judaeo-Arabic mystical writings, comparative and phenomenological aspects of Islam, the formative period of Islamic mysticism, and related topics. Papers on these topics were published in many academic publications and can be viewed on www.academia.edu. Her book The Taste of Hidden Things: Images on the Sufi Path was published in 1997 in the USA. In 2008 Tel-Aviv University Press published Sara’s extensive Sufi Anthology in Hebrew. An Arabic version of this anthology is due to come out summer 2016. Sara is currently preparing a monograph on Aspects of the Formative Period of Islamic Mysticism.

Dr. Krisztina Szilágyi, University of Cambridge
Lecturer 2016/17

Krisztina Szilágyi is research associate at the Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies, University of Cambridge. She received her Ph.D. from Princeton University. Prior to that, she studied Arabic and Jewish Studies in Budapest, Damascus and Jerusalem. Her main interest lies in the interactions between Christians, Jews and Muslims in the medieval Islamic world, in particular as reflected in polemical literature. Her publications include “Christian Learning about Islam in the Early ‘Abbāsid Caliphate: The Muslim Sources of the Disputation of the Monk Abraham of Tiberias,” in The Place to Go: Contexts of Learning in Baghdād, 750-1000 C.E., ed. Jens Scheiner and Damien Janos (Princeton, N.J.: Darwin Press, 2014), pp. 267-342, “A Prophet like Jesus? The First Christian Polemical Narratives of Muḥammad’s Death and Their Muslim Sources,” Jerusalem Studies in Arabic and Islam 36 (2009): 131-171, and “Christian Books in Jewish Libraries: Fragments of Christian Arabic Writings from the Cairo Genizah,” Ginzei Qedem 2 (2006): 107-162.

Dr. Ayala Eliahu, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem
Tutor IEIW

Ayala Eliyahu's research interest is medieval Islamic and Jewish philosophy. She works at the Knesset research center, and as a tutor at the FU IE program. Among Dr. Eliyahu's publications are: 
"From Kitāb al-ḥadāʾiq to Kitāb al-dawāʾir: Reconsidering Ibn al-Sīd al-Baṭalyawsī's Philosophical Treatise", al-Qanṭara XXXVI (1) (2015).  And: "Muslim and Jewish Philosophy in al-Andalus: Ibn al-Sīd al-Baṭalyawsī and Moses ibn Ezra", in: A. Ashur (ed.), Judaeo-Arabic Culture in al-Andalus: 13th Conference of the Society for Judaeo-Arabic Studies Cordoba 2007. Cordoba Near Eastern Research Unit, Series Judæo-Islamica 1, CSIC, Cordoba 2013.