Principal Investigators
Professor Mercedes García-Arenal is a Research Professor at Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, Madrid and the world’s leading expert on Muslim minorities in Iberia. Her work focuses on the religious history of the Muslim West, mainly on religious minorities: conversion, polemics, messianism, religious dissidence, and dissimulation. She has focused on the impulses of assimilation and rejection by mainstream societies of religious minorities such as Muslims and converted Muslims in Iberia and Jews in North Africa. Much of her research is based on Inquisition documentation. She has cultivated long-term research interest in the study of religious minorities and religious conversion from a new methodological vantage point. She has thus been increasingly drawn to the small-scale, singular study of individual experiences that suggest a process of gradual disengagement, involving closely entwined yet competing notions of religion and group belonging, in cases that illustrate how formal institutions of power function while handling people’s affairs. Among the latter she has been especially interested in individuals who walk away from groups, and in looking at groups through the eyes of the disaffected and the uncommitted.
Professor John Tolan is a leading expert in medieval European anti-Muslim polemics and in the history of European perceptions of Islam. He is currently Professor of Medieval History at the University of Nantes and a member of the Academia Europæa. He is co-director of the Institute for Religious Pluralism and Atheism (IPRA) and coordinated the European research programme Religion and Law in Medieval Christian and Muslim Societies (RELMIN) (ERC Advanced Grant) on the legal status of religious minorities in the Euro-Mediterranean area (5th–15th centuries). Professor Tolan has published more than 55 articles in international journals and collected works and author of 'Latin Europe and the Arab world in the middle ages: Cultures in conflict and convergence' and 'Sons of Ishmael: Muslims through European Eyes in the Middle Ages'. His latest book 'Faces of Muhammad: Western Perceptions of the Prophet of Islam from the Middle Ages to Today' is available from Princeton University Press.
Professor Roberto Tottoli, University of Naples, L'Orientale, is an eminent Arabist and scholar of Islamic history and an expert in Arabic Qur’anic manuscript traditions as well as in the history of European Latin and vernacular translations of the Qur’an. Since 2002 he has taught Islamic Studies and Islamic Arabic literature in the Africa and Mediterranean Asia Department at the University of Naples L'Orientale. His research interests focus on Muslim traditions and literature. His early studies and his PhD dealt with the stories of the biblical prophets in the Quran and Islamic literature, especially in the early centuries of Islam. He later expanded his interests to hadith literature, Quranic exegesis, and Muslim contemporary literature. In more recent years Professor Tottoli's interests focus on issues around textual criticism in relation Arabic texts, the literary genres of Islamic literature, and contemporary Islam. Professor Roberto Tottoli is a regular contributor to the Encyclopaedia of Islam and writes as a commentator on issues related to Islam and the Islamic world on Corriere della sera. His publications include 'Biblical Prophets in the Qur'an and Muslim literature' and 'The Stories of the Prophets of Ibn Mutarrif al-Tarafi'.
Professor Jan Loop is a leading expert in the history of European scholarly interactions with the Islamic world and the Arabic language and has significantly advanced awareness of the entanglement of Islamic and Arabic studies and the process of confessionalisation in early modern Europe. His teaching and research interests are in the intellectual, religious and cultural history of Europe and the Near East, with a special focus on Western knowledge of the Arab, Ottoman and Persian world between 1450 and 1800. Based at the University of Copenhagen, Professor Loop is a is a founding member of the Centre for the History of Arabic Studies in Europe at the Warburg Institute, London and a Senior Research Fellow at the New York University Abu Dhabi Institute. He was a Principal Investigator, between 2013 and 2016, of the European-funded collaborative research project Encounters with the Orient in Early Modern European Scholarship (EOS). He has published 'Auslegungskulturen, a comparative study of Christian and Islamic hermeneutic concepts in early modern times', 'Johann Heinrich Hottinger: Arabic and Islamic Studies in the Seventeenth Century', and he is currently working on a monograph on Western European pilgrims to Mecca.
