Dr Paul Babinski

Paul Babinski (PhD, Princeton 2020) studies the history of early modern oriental philology, with a focus on the formative role of Ottoman scholarship in seventeenth and eighteenth-century oriental studies. In his research, he surveys early modern collections of Islamic manuscripts to reconstruct the libraries and scholarly practices of orientalists. His work on the first Western European students of Persian literature and their reliance on Ottoman commentaries and Persian-speaking amanuenses was published in Lias as “Ottoman Philology and the Origins of Persian Studies in Western Europe: The Gulistān’s Orientalist Readers”. As part of the EuQu project in Copenhagen he will study the provenance and readers’ notes of Qur’an manuscripts in early modern Northern European collections to trace how early modern orientalists read the Arabic Qur’an text.