Department of History and Cultural Studies

Whether it is the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation or the Minerva Foundation Society for Research (Minerva Stiftung Gesellschaft für die Forschung): Fellows and visiting scholars with very different research projects are associated with the Arabistik.

Not only the Seminar for Semitic and Arabic Studies, also our two research projects funded by European Research Council (ERC)—PalREAD and AnonymClassic—participate in the Lange Nacht der Wissenschaften. The interested audience will be introduced to the what "research" means in the humanities.

In summer 2018, the seminar "One Thousand and One Nights" by Kathrin Wittler (Comparative Literatures) and Victoria Mummelthei (Arabic Studies) had been sponsored in the framework of the programme SUPPORT for Teaching.

In the context of the ongoing academic cooperation between Freie Universität Berlin and the Doha Institute for Graduate Studies (DI), seven students from FU Berlin will take part in the winter semester 2018/19 in an intensive Modern Standard Arabic language course designed for advanced students.

The student association FAVO ('Fachschaft Vorderer Orient') consists of members of the focus areas of Arabic Studies, Iranian Studies, Islamic Studies, Semitic Studies and Turkology: fachschaft.gkvo@gmail.com

Researchers of Arabic Studies at the Freie Universität Berlin pursue various research questions in a variety of projects, from mirrors for princes to early modern philology and Palestinian literature.

At the Freie Universität Berlin, Arabic Studies can be studied as part of the bachelor's programme 'History and Culture of the Near East' and as a consecutive master's programme 'Arabic Studies'.

From now on, up-to-date information and dates can be found on the Facebook page of Arabistik – Freie Universität Berlin.

The ERC project PalREAD aims to tell the story of Palestinian literature by tracing, collecting, mapping and analyzing the development and evolution of Palestinian literary and cultural production and practices from 1948 to the present across various Arab, European, American, and Latin American countries.

The Graduate Schools of the FU Berlin offer graduates from the field of Arabic Studies the opportunity to receive a PhD under supervision of, e.g., Prof. Dr. Beatrice Gruendler.

Under the direction of Prof. Dr. Dimitri Gutas,the project funded by the Einstein Foundation will create a multilingual critical edition and study of the poetics of Aristotle and its comments between Europe and Islam.

In March 2018, the Arabistik was in charge of organising the international conference on "Documents and Manuscripts of the Arab-Islamic World" of the International Society for Arabic Papyrology (ISAP).

Arabic Studies conduct research in several projects with the help of digital methods; in addition, the subject area cooperates with Byzantine Studies in the framework of courses on Digital Humanities and provides the students with digital tools in their first bachelor's semesters.

"With the Doha Institute, the Freie Universität Berlin is expanding its already strong network with universities in Arabic-speaking countries," says Florian Kohstall from the Center for International Cooperation at Freie Universität Berlin.

Assistant Professor Islam Dayeh and his team are investigating the history of linguistic-based sciences and textual practices in the early modern period of the Arabic-Islamic World (1500-1900) within the Dahlem International Network's Junior Research Group "Arabic Philology and Textual Practices in the Early Modern Period".

The e-learning and e-teaching project allowed students to digitally work with Arabic manuscripts and compare different versions in a digital synoptic edition.

On the basis of the e-learning pilot project "Kalila wa-Dimna - Wisdom Encoded", Prof Dr. Beatrice Gruendler devotes her research to a comprehensive study of the pre-modern mirror for pronces "Kalila wa-Dimna" in the ERC-funded project "AnonymClassic".

In order to show that the transfer of knowledge from late antiquity was by no means limited to philosophy and the sciences, this project will examine core elements of what has been seen as the ‘genuinely Arabic’ canon of knowledge, namely the Qur’an and Islamic Qur’an studies and Qur'an linguistics.