Department of History and Cultural Studies

Hala Abdalhadi is responsible for Arabic manuscript translations and contributes to the KD Digital Edition.

Mathea Glaubitz holds a MA in Comparative Literature from Freie Universität Berlin. She contributed to the project's publications management.

Albert Schlosser reads Arabic Studies at Freie Universität Berlin; to the Kalīla and Dimna research project, he contributed particular expertise of manuscripts written in Garshuni script.

Ulrich Marzolph researches Middle Eastern popular literature and narrative culture. His research project on "101 Middle Eastern Tales and Their Impact on Western Oral Tradition" was published in 2020.

Rachel Peled Cuartas works on the Hebrew versions of Kalīla and Dimna and Barlaam and Josaphat (The Prince and the Monk), translating them to Spanish and English.

Oualid El Khattabi is responsible for the manuscript transcription team as well as the near-verbatim English translations of the Digital Edition.

Dima M. Sakran is a student researcher, she works on manuscript codicology data and their implementation in the project’s Digital Edition.

Project coordinator Agnes Kloocke is responsible for project and budget management as well as project events and public relations.

Ruslan Pavlyshyn is Ertegun Scholar at the Faculty of Oriental Studies, University of Oxford (Pembroke College), graduating in Islamic Studies and History.

Marwa M. Ahmed developed the software engineering of the project's Digital Preview Edition and manages the project’s Digital Edition workflows.

Pascal Belouin works as an IT Architect for Department III of the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science (MPIWG), which aims to facilitate and streamline humanities research through the use of digital tools.

Lecturer in Arabic (retired), Department of Near Eastern Languages and Cultures, University of California Los Angeles

KITAB provides a digital tool-box and a forum for discussions about Arabic texts. We wish to empower users to explore Arabic texts in completely new ways and to expand the frontiers of knowledge about one of the world’s largest and most complex textual traditions.

Yoones Dehghani works in the fields of Arabic and Persian philology and codicology at the Oriental Department of Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin – Preußischer Kulturbesitz. He was AnonymClassic Visiting Scholar in both 2019 and 2020 and stays part of the Kalīla and Dimna research project.

Rima Redwan explores the manuscript illustrations within Kalila and Dimna traditions. She earned her MA in Arabic Studies specializing in manuscript studies.

Victoria Mummelthei teaches at the Arabic Studies Department; after her corpus linguistic dissertation on the poetry of the Syrian author Nizar Qabbani (1923-1998), she is now researching the "language of Arabic Studies" from a meta-scientific perspective. She is the deputy academic advisor for the Master's programs Arabic Studies and Interdisciplinary Studies of the Middle East (ISME), and is responsible for academic communication and social media both for the Arabic Studies Department as well as ISME.

Mahmoud Kozae provided the conceptual and computational framework for the project's Digital Edition.

Johannes Stephan explores the indirect transmission of Kalila wa-Dimna in Arabic from the 9th century onwards, focusing on the significance of linguistic variations and registers.

Khouloud Khalfallah curates the codicological analyses of the Arabic manuscript versions as well as the digital manuscript archive.

Theodore S. Beers, Persian and Arabic philologist, focuses on the transmission, translation, and reworking of material connected to Kalīla wa-Dimna, with particular regard to the interplay between the Arabic and Persian traditions.

Isabel Toral, deputy PI, focuses on aspects of fictional storytelling and cultural translation.

Beatrice Gruendler is the Principal Investigator of the project. Her philological expertise and her interest in Digital Humanities in the field of Arabic philology and Non-Latin Script Data are at the core of her research.

Asmaa Essakouti is a Postdoc researcher focusing on Premodern and Modern Arabic literature, Maqāmāt, Adab, Narratology, Fiction, and Nahda.

Senior Lecturer in Arabic and Islamic Studies at the University of Exeter, England.

Jens Inden researches on Arabic poetics for his PhD thesis at the University of Texas, Austin (Prof. Dr. Avigail Noy). He works on the influence of Persian wisdom on the Arabic versions of Kalīla wa-Dimna.

Ignacio Sánchez is Distinguished Research Fellow at the Escuela de Traductores de Toledo, University of Castilla La Mancha, Spain.

Pegah Shahbaz specializes in Persian literature and works on questions of narratology, translation, and systems of knowledge transmission in the Persianate World.

Alice Woolston is a student researcher of the KD research project. She is responsible for the project's Research Bibliography on ZOTERO (available online).

Jan van Ginkel researches on Syriac as a bridge culture in the Middle East, his findings are at the core of the project's research.

Matthew L. Keegan worked on the theorization of fictive writing in pre-modern Arabic. In 2019, he became the Moinian Assistant Professor in Asian and Middle Eastern Cultures at Barnard College of Columbia University.

The Center for Digital Systems (CeDiS) is the competence center for e-learning, e-research and multimedia at Freie Universität Berlin, supporting all inhouse institutions in the use of digital media and technologies in teaching and research.

Bibliotheca Arabica is dedicated to research on Arabic literatures dating from the years 1150 to 1850 CE, and combines literary and manuscript studies. Within this defined period of investigation, Bibliotheca Arabica focusses on literary production, transmission, and reception, and sets these in relation to the political and social transformations that were taking place at that time.

"Tradition manuscrite et transmission iconographique: les manuscrits à peintures de Kalîla wa Dimna à la Bibliothèque nationale de France" aims at the description and interpretation of the Arabic, Persian and Turkish manuscripts of Kalila wa-Dimna preserved at the Bibliothèque nationale de France.

LERA is an interactive, digital tool for analyzing variations between multiple versions of a text in a synoptic manner developed at Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg.

Seeing in the rise of Digital Technologies an opportunity to re-assess and re-establish how the humanities can advance the understanding of the past and to support a dialogue among civilizations.