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People

Walid SALEH

University of Toronto

Walid Ahmad Saleh is Professor of Islamic Studies at the Department for the Study of Religion and Near and Middle Eastern Civilizations at the University of Toronto. He is a specialist on the Qur’an, the history of its interpretation, the Arabic manuscript tradition, Islamic apocalyptic literature, and Muslim’s reception of the Bible. His first book The Formation of the Classical Tafsir Tradition was the first monograph study ofal-Thalabi (d. 1035) and his influence. His second monograph, In Defense of the Bible, is a detailed study and an edition of al-Biqa`i’s (d. 1480) Bible treatise.

Suzanne Conklin AKBARI

Institute for Advanced Study

Suzanne Conklin Akbari is Professor of Medieval Studies at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, NJ. Her books are on optics and allegory (Seeing Through the Veil) and European views of Islam and the Orient (Idols in the East), and she’s also edited volumes on travel literature, Mediterranean Studies, and somatic histories, plus How We Write and How We Read. Her most recent book is The Oxford Handbook of Chaucer (2020), co-edited with James Simpson. A co-editor of the Norton Anthology of World Literature, Akbari co-hosts a literature podcast called The Spouter Inn.

Andreas BENDLIN

University of Toronto

Andreas Bendlin is Associate Professor of Classics at the Departments of Historical Studies and of Classics at the University of Toronto. He is working on ancient Mediterranean migration, Roman associations, and Graeco-Roman cultural history more generally, but the main focus of his research is religion in the Roman Mediterranean, from the city of Rome and Italy to the Imperial Greek East, and from the archaic period to Roman religion’s Nachleben in the modern world. Current research includes a large-scale project on demography, migration, and urbanism, and their impact on religious pluralism in the city of Rome.

Lorenza BENNARDO

University of Toronto

I am an Assistant Professor (Limited Term) at the Department of Historical Studies, University of Toronto Mississauga. My work focuses on Latin Poetry of the 1^st century C.E., and especially on Flavian Epic. My main research project investigates the ways in which imitation and intertextuality in Latin epic poetry create a space for reacting to contemporary philological discussions. I am also interested in the reception of philosophical ideas in Flavian Epic and in the construction of Statius’ literary language.

Feriel BOUHAFA

Senior Research Associate at the University of Cambridge

Dr. Bouhafa received her Ph.D. from Georgetown University and is now a senior research associate at the Faculty of Divinity at the University of Cambridge. Her research interests lie in Arabic philosophy and Islamic sciences, focusing on law, ethics, and rhetoric and poetics. In her first book entitled Economy of Contingency in Ethics, Law, and Truth: Ibn Rushd’s Moral Philosophy, currently under preparation, Bouhafa identifies a philosophy of law in Ibn Rushd’s philosophical and legal works which not only assesses the epistemological basis of the Islamic system of knowledge but also admits the necessity of rectifying legal norms to redress ethical deficiencies stemming from the contingency of human actions.

Jonathan BRENT

University of Toronto

Jonathan Brent is the project manager for Practices of Commentary. He received his Ph.D. from Toronto’s Centre for Medieval Studies in June. His research focuses on periodization, anachronism, and the vernacularization of medieval history writing. His dissertation is a comprehensive study of Nicholas Trevet’s Cronicles (c. 1334), an Anglo-Norman universal history most famous for its later use by Chaucer.

Elisa BRILLI

University of Toronto

Elisa Brilli is Professor of Italian Studies at the Department of Italian Studies at the University of Toronto. She is a specialist on Dante studies, with an interest in the interactions between history and literature, medieval exemplary literature, and historiography. Her first book Firenze e il Profeta provides a comprehensive analysis of the depiction of Florence in Dante’s works from three perspectives: its dialogue with civic memory, its reshaping of theological paradigms, and its autobiographical implications. She is the chief editor of the critical edition of the Alphabetum Narrationum by Arnold of Liège, a 14^th-century collection of 800 exemplary tales.

Stefanie BRINKMANN

Saxon Academy for Sciences and Humanities, Leipzig

Stefanie Brinkmann is Research Fellow at the Bibliotheca Arabica Project funded by the Saxon Academy of Sciences and Humanities in Leipzig, Germany. During her time as research associate and acting professor for Arabic and Islamic Studies at the universities of Leipzig, Freiburg im Breisgau and Hamburg, she served as research assistant and principal investigator of a number of manuscript projects, and she was a long-term board member of The Islamic Manuscript Association. Her main research interests are manuscript studies, hadith, material culture (especially the history of food and drink), and classical Arabic poetry.

Shayne CLARKE

McMaster University

Shayne Clarke is an associate professor in the Department of Religious Studies, McMaster University, where he has taught courses on Indian (and East Asian) Buddhism since completing his PhD at UCLA in 2006. He is a specialist in the study of Indian Buddhist monastic law (Vinaya), working primarily on legal texts—both canonical and commentarial—preserved in Sanskrit, Tibetan, and Chinese. His work aims to recover, among other things, lost voices and views from premodern sources, including those related to pregnant nuns and monastic mothers: Buddhist monasticism, but not as we generally imagine it.

Mordechai COHEN

Yeshiva University

Mordechai Cohen is Associate Dean and Professor of Bible at the Bernard Revel Graduate School of Jewish Studies. Reflected in his recent volume, The Rule of Peshat, his research focuses on Jewish Bible commentary in Muslim and Christian contexts. His earlier volumes, Three Approaches to Biblical Metaphor and Opening the Gates of Interpretation, show how Jewish thinkers drew upon Arabic poetics and Muslim jurisprudence to interpret the Bible. In 2010/11, Cohen directed a fourteen-member international research group at the Israel Institute for Advanced Studies, leading to the publication of Interpreting Scriptures in Judaism, Christianity and Islam, co-edited with Adele Berlin.

Islam DAYEH

Freie Universität Berlin

Islam Dayeh is Assistant Professor of Arabic and Islamic studies at Freie Universität Berlin. His research focuses on Arabic-Islamic intellectual history and textual scholarship in the early modern period. He is the director of the research programme Zukunftsphilologie: Revisiting the Canons of Textual Scholarship (Forum Transregionale Studien Berlin) and founding editor of the journal Philological Encounters (Brill).

Benjamin DURHAM

University of Toronto

Benjamin Durham is a PhD candidate at the Centre for Medieval Studies at the University of Toronto. He is a specialist on the Latin manuscript tradition, scholastic theology, and the nascent stages of the university system in Western Europe. His dissertation is a commentary on and edition of several sermons by Peter Comestor, a twelfth-century theologian and chancellor of the Notre-Dame cathedral school at Paris.

Sloane GEDDES

University of Toronto

I am a doctoral student in the Department for the Study of Religion at the University of Toronto where I work on medieval Sanskrit poetry and Court Epic (mahākāvya) in particular. Within this genre I am engrossed in questions of how Sanskrit narratives cross religious, courtly, and textual boundaries in addition to broader questions of textual reception and literary aesthetics. My dissertation work centres on Śivasvāmin’s Kapphiṇābhyudaya (The Rise of Kapphiṇa), a 9^th century Court Epic from Kashmir.

Ash GEISSINGER

Carleton University

Ash (Aisha) Geissinger is an Associate Professor at Carleton University, Canada. Geissinger’s research is located at the intersection of the study of the Qur’an and its exegesis, the Hadith literature and hadith commentaries, and gender. Their book, Gender and Muslim Constructions of Exegetical Authority: A Rereading of the Classical Genre of Qurʾān Commentary (Brill, 2015) is the first monograph-length critical study of the textual functions of exegetical materials attributed to women which are often quoted in classical Qur’an commentaries. It argues for and models a new approach to studying Qur’an commentaries which utilizes gender as an analytical lens.

Jennifer GERBER

Goethe-Universität Frankfurt am Main

Jennifer Gerber studied Medieval and Renaissance Studies with focus on German Literature, History and Art History. She is research associate in Medieval German Studies at the University of Frankfurt am Main. Her main research interests are in the fields of a historical narratology and courtly romances. Her dissertation project deals with the late Arthurian romance Meleranz written by the Pleier and asks for narrative possibilities of text organization and structuring that go beyond the typical narrator figure.

Amanda GOODMAN

University of Toronto

Amanda Goodman is Assistant Professor of Buddhist Studies in the Department for the Study of Religion and the Department of East Asian Studies at the University of Toronto. She specializes in premodern Chinese Buddhist traditions, with a focus on the development of Chinese esoteric Buddhist ritual during the eighth, ninth, and tenth centuries. Her first book project, Buddhism at the Margins: Essays on Esoteric Buddhist Ritual at Dunhuang (in preparation) explores the Buddhist training and practice communities documented in tenth-century Chinese and Tibetan ritual manuscripts from Dunhuang.

Elisabeth HOLLENDER

Goethe University Frankfurt

Elisabeth Hollender is Professor of Jewish Studies at the Department of Jewish Studies at Goethe University Frankfurt. She is a specialist on medieval Jewish culture in Ashkenaz with a focus on liturgical poetry and exegesis, including commentaries on liturgical poetry. After her first book Qedushta’ot des Simon b. Isaak nach dem Amsterdam Mahsor. Übersetzung und Kommentar on liturgical poetry from Mainz, she published widely on piyyut commentary, including Clavis Commentariorum of Hebrew Liturgical Poetry in Manuscript and Piyyut Commentary in Medieval Ashkenaz.

Walker HORSFALL

University of Toronto

Walker Horsfall is a PhD candidate at the Centre for Medieval Studies at the University of Toronto. His research focuses on the interaction between medieval German literature and contemporary scientific materials. His dissertation project analyzes the poetry of the Middle High German poet Heinrich von Meissen, better known as Frauenlob, for its integration of natural philosophy into poetic form.

Matthew L. KEEGAN

Barnard College, Columbia University

Matthew L. Keegan is the Moinian Assistant Professor in the Department of Asian and Middle Eastern Cultures at Barnard College. His research focuseson Islamic intellectual history and adab (usually translated as “literature” or “belles-lettres”). He has written on Islamic legal riddles, and he is currently writing a monograph about the commentaries on al-Hariri’s Maqamat, a 12th-century collection of stories about an eloquent trickster who uses his wits and his mastery of language to dupe his audiences. He received his PhD from NYU, taught at the American University of Sharjah, and completed a postdoc at the Freie Universität Berlin.

Christina LECHTERMANN

Goethe-University Frankfurt/Main, FB 10, IDLD (Medieval German Literature)

Currently, my interest is focused on two different subject areas: a) technical literature of the Early Modern Period and above all 16^th century printed books that present skills and knowledge in constructive geometry, and b) vernacular legends and poetry praising the virgin Mary, above all ‘Gloss Songs’ (Glossenlieder), ‘Marienpsalter’ and narratives presenting the life of the virgin.