Dr. Michael E. Pregill

Michael E. Pregill (PhD Columbia University, 2008) is a scholar of the Qur’an and its interpretation; the origins of Islam in the late antique milieu; and Muslim relations with non-Muslims. He has held a number of academic positions, including Assistant and Associate Professor of Religious Studies and Distinguished Emerging Scholar at Elon University (2007–2014) and Interlocutor in the Institute for the Study of Muslim Societies and Civilizations at Boston University (2015–2018), where he directed the Mizan digital scholarship initiative and edited the peer-reviewed, open access Mizan: Journal for the Study of Muslim Societies and Civilizations. He also served as editor of the Journal of the International Qur’anic Studies Association from 2015 to 2018, and is currently co-chair of the Qur’an and Late Antiquity program unit of IQSA. He is the author of numerous peer-reviewed journal articles, review essays, book chapters, and public scholarship pieces. His monograph The Golden Calf between Bible and Qur’an: Scripture, Polemic, and Exegesis from Late Antiquity to Islam was published by Oxford University Press in 2020. Under the auspices of the EuQu project, he will be researching and writing a new monograph, “Re-Orienting Geiger: Revisiting the Jewish Foundations of Western Qur’anic Studies,” which reevaluates the contribution of Abraham Geiger (d. 1874) to the modern study of the Qur’an and the relationships between Bible, Qur’an, midrash, and tafsir explored in Geiger’s classic Was hat Mohammed aus dem Judenthume aufgenommen?(1833).