Department of History and Cultural Studies

Mathea Glaubitz is studying for a Master's degree in General and Comparative Literature and has been a student assistant at the Seminar for Semitic and Arabic Studies since March 2019. Here she works for the research program "Zukunftsphilologie: Revisiting the Canon of Textual Scholarship" led by Prof. Dr. Islam Dayeh.

Ibrahim Abdou has been a research associate in the ERC project PalREAD – Country of Words since June 2020. Previously, he supported PalREAD as a student assistant from 2018 until 2020. His research interests span from literary production in mandate Palestine to speculative fiction in Arabic literature over the last two decades.

Ali Adnan Sakr is a Research Associate working with Dimitri Gutas and Beatrice Gründler on their research project “Aristotle’s Poetics in the West (of India) from Antiquity to the Renaissance” funded by the Einstein Foundation Berlin. His focus within the project lies on the contributions of Islamic philosophers to making Aristotle’s Poetics known in the ‘Islamic Golden Age’ while synthesizing Aristotelianism and Neoplatonism with ideas introduced through Islam and medieval Arabic literary criticism. Center of attention is especially Avicenna’s reception of the Poetics in his Kitāb al-Shifāʾ (The Book of Healing).

Alexandre Roberts is Assistant Professor of Classics at the University of Southern California and a visiting scholar at the Freie Universität Berlin (2020–2021). His first book, Reason and Revelation in Byzantine Antioch, is on the translation activities of the eleventh-century Arabic-speaking, Byzantine-Christian scholar ʿAbdallāh ibn al-Faḍl of Antioch as a window onto engagement with ancient Greek, Byzantine, and Islamicate thought in and around Antioch during the pivotal century of Byzantine rule. His current project examines how scholars in the Eastern Mediterranean and Islamic world working in various traditions, from physics and alchemy to theology, understood matter and its transformation.

Hanan Natour is a German-Palestinian research associate at the ERC-funded project "PalREAD – Country of Words: Reading and Reception of Palestinian Literature from 1948 to the Present". Her focus within this project lies on the reception of Palestinian literature in North Africa. As a member of the Friedrich Schlegel Graduate School of Literary Studies she currently prepares her doctoral dissertation on narratives of liberation, emancipation and decoloniality in contemporary Tunisian Arabic prose.

James White ist seit Oktober 2019 Alexander von Humboldt-Stipendiat an der Arabistik. In seiner Forschung beschäftigt er sich mit Anthologien, Sammelhandschriften und Werken der Literaturgeschichte, um zu untersuchen, wie die Korpora der arabischen und persischen Dichtung während der Spätmittelalter und der frühen Neuzeit gestaltet worden sind. Sein derzeitiges Projekt heißt „Literarische Migrationen: arabische und persische Dichtung um das arabische Meer, 1600-1700“.

Heba Tebakhi has been working as a research assistant within the “PalRead” project since June 2020. Her research focuses on Palestinian oral literature. In her fieldwork, Heba collects tales from Palestine and from the Palestinian Diaspora to track the changes that occurred to them and to observe whether these changes are linked to political and social developments.

Marcel Gaida has been a research associate in the ERC project PalREAD - Country of Words since the beginning of 2019; here he is investigating the sustainable digital access of the research data of the project on Palestinian literature as well as the possibility of quantitative linguistic analysis of the data; in addition to the general research data management, he also ensures that data protection and ethical principles are observed. He is also responsible for academic communication and social media. He is involved in academic self-administration in the department's budget commission.

Islam Dayeh is Assistant Professor of Arabic and Islamic studies at Freie Universität Berlin. His research focuses on Arabic-Islamic intellectual history and textual practices. He is the director of the research programme Zukunftsphilologie: Revisiting the Canons of Textual Scholarship (Forum Transregionale Studien Berlin) and founding editor of the journal Philological Encounters (Brill).

Ayman Yasin Atat, since 2020 he is an Einstein guest researcher. He is a pharmacist, holding a PhD degree in the history of medical sciences; in his studies, he sheds lights on Arabic medical and pharmaceutical manuscripts and the history of Arab medicine; in addition, he studies the history of materia medica in the Arab civilizationcomparing them with German and European traditions. His current project deals with the rare and unique Arabic pharmaceutical manuscripts in the Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin.

Montserrat Rabadán has been a research assistant for the Arabic Studies department since 2011 and is a lecturer for Modern Standard Arabic and Classical Arabic since 2015 in the bachelor's program History and Culture of the Middle East.
She is specialized in Arabic literature and literature of oral tradition (folktales). She is also responsible for the Erasmus exchange program for incoming international students and outgoing students from the Arabic Studies department.

Ruben Schenzle ist seit 2017 wissenschaftlicher Mitarbeiter an der Arabistik, wo er sich als stellvertretender Studiengangsbeauftragter im Bachelorstudiengang Geschichte und Kultur des Vorderen Orients, Schwerpunkt Arabistik, für die Studienfach- und ABV-Beratung verantwortlich zeigt. Er unterrichtet sowohl in Bachelor- als auch Masterstudiengängen Kurse zu Koran und Koranexegese, zur moderenen arabischen Literatur und zur Literaturübersetzung. Aktuell forscht er für sein Dissertationsvorhaben zu Utopien in der arabischen Literatur.

Oualid El Khattabi is a master’s student at the English Studies: Literature, Language, Culture MA program at Freie Universität Berlin. He holds a BA in English Language and Literature from Abdelmalek Essaadi University, Martil, Morocco, and a Translation Degree (Arabic-English-French) from King Fahd School of Translation, Tangier, Morocco. He joined the “Kalīla and Dimna – AnonymClassic” ERC project in April 2020. Within the project, he is responsible for transcribing manuscripts and works on producing an English translation of various versions of The Chapter of the Cat and Rat for the project's upcoming Preview Edition.

Since April 2020, Dima Sakran is a student research assistant for the ERC-project Kalīla and Dimna – AnonymClassic. She focuses both on manuscript transcription and the implementation of data to the project’s LERA platform.

Ruslan Pavlyshyn is a third year BA Student in Arabic Studies, majoring in Arabic and Persian. Since March 2019 he is student assistant at the Seminar of Arabic Studies and, from August 2019, also for ERC-Project Kalīla and Dimna – AnonymClassic.

Rima Redwan has been since the beginning of 2020 a research fellow in the ERC project Kalīla and Dimna — AnonynmClassic. She is especially responsible for analyzing the illustrations, legends, and the image cycle in the Arabic manuscripts. Here the focus is on the connection between image and text. In addition, she works on embedded narratives in the Arabic versions, collecting and documenting their variety.

Victoria Mummelthei is a researcher at the Arabic Studies Department; here she teaches courses in modern Arabic literature in particular in Bachelor's and Master's programs; she conducts research on the field of the linguistics of Arabic in Arabic literature and Arabic literature as world literature. She is the deputy academic advisor for the Master's programs Arabic Studies and Interdisciplinary Studies of the Middle East (ISME) and is involved in academic self-administration in the field of study structure development and internationalization. She is responsible for academic communication and social media both for the Arabic Studies Department and for the project "Kalīla and Dimna - AnonymClassic".

Johannes Stephan is PostDoc in the ERC project Kalīla and Dimna – AnonymClassic. His research interests are Arabic travel literature, narrative theory, and the conception of fictionality. He mainly scrutinizes the early Arabic reception (8.-13th century) of Kalīla wa-Dimna, i.e. examining quotes from and comments on the Arabic text in other works. Among his other interests are the linguistic variation within Arabic during the early modern period and the elaboration on the category of narrative framing. He runs a reading circle and organizes a series of events, both under the title "Framing Narratives."

Khouloud Khalfallah is since November 2018 a research fellow at the ERC-funded project "Kalīla and Dimna – AnonymClassic". Her focus within this project lies in the classification of Kalīla wa-Dimna versions, as well as the transcription and the description of the Arabic manuscripts.

Theo Beers is a philologist specializing in late medieval and early modern Persian literary history. He also works with Arabic sources and studies the connections in literary culture between the two languages. In the AnonymClassic project, much of his research concerns the early translations of Kalīla and Dimna from Arabic into Persian. He has a complementary interest in the digital humanities, and he has developed several web apps to facilitate scholarly work. He recently received his PhD from the University of Chicago.

Isabel Toral, seit November 2008 Privatdozentin und seit Oktober 2020 außerplanmäßige Professorin an der Arabistik, ist seit Oktober 2018 stellvertretende Leiterin des Projekts "Kalīla and Dimna — AnonymClassic". Ihre Forschungsschwerpunkte liegen im Bereich der arabischen Kulturgeschichte, mit einem besonderen Fokus auf die vorislamische Zeit und die Zeit bis ins 11. Jhd. n. Chr. Zu ihren regionalen Schwerpunkten gehören al-Andalus, Syrien und der Iraq. Ihr besonderes Interesse gilt Formen des Kulturkontakts und Transfers.

Beatrice Gruendler is not only an expert on medieval Arabic and the book culture in the Islamic world, but also a far-sighted thinker across humanities disciplines. She is the academic advisor for the Bachelor's program History and Culture of the Middle East, focus area in Arabic Studies, and for the Master's program Arabic Studies; she is also a Principal Investigator in the Friedrich Schlegel Graduate School of Literary Studies and the Berlin Graduate School of Muslim Cultures and Societies. As head of the project "Kalīla and Dimna - AnonymClassic", she draws in particular on her philological expertise, her familiarity with Arabic paleography and codicology and her interest in digital humanities for Arabic philology.

Jan van Ginkel is a Senior PostDoc for Syriac-Aramaic within the Arabistik Seminar, within the ERC-Project AnonymClassic „Kalila and Dimna“ and within the SFB-Project C10 Verses and Sayings. Impetus and Range of Scholarly and Popularising Discourses in the Arabic World. His focus is on the History and Culture of Syriac Christianity and their Interconnectedness with related Traditions, like Greek and Arabic. He tends to work on Historiographical Texts and “Folk Literature”, its transmission and continuous development.