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.
