Naima Afif obtained a MA and a PhD in Oriental Studies from the Université catholique de Louvain (2015). Her expertise includes Islamic Studies, Biblical languages, Syriac Studies and Digital Humanities.
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.
Asaph Ben-Tov (PhD Jerusalem 2007, habil. Erfurt 2019) studies Early Modern intellectual history, especially the Classical Tradition and Oriental Studies in the German speaking territories.
Maurizio Busca achieved in 2017 a joint PhD in French Literature at the Università degli Studi di Torino and the Université Jean Moulin Lyon 3. From 2016 to 2019 he taught French and Italian language, literature and history at the Université Savoie Mont Blanc, and in 2020-2021 he worked as postdoc researcher and a French literature teacher at the Università degli Studi del Piemonte Orientale. His PhD dissertation and a part of his research works were focused on the reception of Latin literature in 16th-17th century France, especially on the articulation between medieval and Renaissance practices of interpretation and translation of Ancient literature.
Ulisse Cecini was born in 1979 in Monza (Italy). After having graduated in “Lettere Classiche” at the Università Cattolica in Milan and having worked on Latin hagiographic poetry of the 10th century (Flodoard of Reims), he obtained a scholarship from the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) to write his PhD-thesis in Medieval Latin at the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg on Latin Qur’an translations in the 12th and 13th centuries from the Iberian Peninsula.
Sara Fani (PhD, Un. “L’Orientale” Naples, 2014) combines her codicological interests in Arabic manuscripts with the historical study of their western collectors and collections, their promotion and conservation (cataloguing and exhibitions). During the last decade she has been working in different Italian libraries focussing on Renaissance and early Modern cultural contexts.
Octavian-Adrian Negoiță (PhD University of Bucharest, 2020) studies the Byzantine and early modern Greek intellectual history with a special emphasis on the religious polemical literature. He earned two MA degrees: Medieval History (University of Bucharest, 2015) and Comparative History (Central European University, 2017).
Giovanni Maria Martini’s (PhD, Un. “L’Orientale” Naples, 2014) main research area is Islamicate intellectual history with a special focus on Sufism, Occult Sciences and their intersection with Qurʾanic disciplines. In 2015 he took up the post of PostDoc at the University of Oxford for the ERC Project IMPAcT, From Late Medieval to Early Modern: 13th to 16th Century Islamic Philosophy And Theology. He was subsequently a PostDoc at the Alexander von Humboldt Kolleg for Islamicate Intellectual History, at the University of Bonn.
Florence Ninitte gained a BA and MA in Romance Studies at the Université catholique de Louvain where she also achieved a PhD in Medieval Languages in December 2016. Her doctoral dissertation, 'La tradition arabo-musulmane dans le Speculum historiale et dans sa traduction française par Jean de Vignay. Enjeux d’un transfert culturel', considers the reception and the integration of Arabic texts about Islam in the Speculum historiale (SH) and in its French translation by Jean de Vignay.
Irene Reginato (1987) has a joint PhD in Romance Philology at Ca 'Foscari University of Venice and École Pratique des Hautes Études in Paris. Her PhD dissertation was on the Catalan version of Marco Polo's Devisement du Monde and was supervised by Eugenio Burgio and Fabio Zinelli.
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.
Pablo Roza Candás (PhD, University of Oviedo, 2009) has specialized in the study of the Aljamiado manuscript production of the Mudejar and Morisco minorities. Besides the edition and study of the Aljamiado corpus, his research interests focus on the cultural and religious practices of the Iberian Crypto-Islamic communities.
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Davide Scotto (PhD, Florence 2012) works as a research fellow at the Historical Seminar of the Goethe University in Frankfurt. He specialises in the study of Christian interactions with Judaism and Islam in premodern Europe and the Mediterranean.
Gulnaz Sibgatullina is a postdoctoral research fellow at Amsterdam School of Historical Studies at the University of Amsterdam. Her research interests lie in the intersection of several fields: (post)colonial translation studies, Muslim-Christian relations and religious language. In 2019 she obtained a PhD degree at Leiden University (the Netherlands); her dissertation on Languages of Islam and Christianity in Post-Soviet Russia was published as a monograph at Brill in 2020.
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Katarzyna K. Starczewska is a Juan de la Cierva post-doctoral researcher at the Spanish National Research Council (CCHS-CSIC) in Madrid. In 2012 she presented her PhD dissertation at the Autonomous University of Barcelona entitled Latin Translation of the Qur’ān (1518/1621) commissioned by Egidio da Viterbo. Critical Edition and Introductory Study.
Emmanuelle Stefanidis studied anthropology, history and Arabic in Edinburgh, Paris and Cairo. She recently completed her PhD in Arabic Studies at Sorbonne-Université (2019). Her dissertation examined the elaboration of diachronic readings of the Qur’an in Muslim traditional exegesis and in Euro-American scholarship.
Federico was born in Rome in 1983 and has a background in the History of Philosophy, Islamic Philosophy and Political Philosophy. He obtained a Master’s Degree in the History of Philosophy (supervised by Prof. Mauro Zonta) in 2010 and a PhD in Oriental Studies (supervised by Prof. Leonardo Capezzone) in 2014, both of them at Sapienza University of Rome.