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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.

Shuaib ALLY

Institute of Islamic Studies, McGill University

Shuaib Ally is a SSHRC postdoctoral fellow at the Institute of Islamic Studies at McGill University. He works on commentaries on the Qur’an and on works of classical Arabic rhetoric and literary theory. His PhD dissertation (University of Toronto, 2022) was about past and present anxieties over the loss of scholarly classics, specifically the work of an 11th C Persian scholar ʿAbd al-Qāhir al-Jurjānī, who wrote the most important book of classical Arabic rhetoric and literary theory. His project used paratextual evidence in extant copies of his work to trace its historical transmission and scholarly engagement with a work that has been allegedly lost.

Mohannad ABUSARAH

University of Toronto

Mohannad Abusarah is a PhD student in the Department for the Study of Religion. He earned his second Bachelor and MA degree in the Study of Religion from the University of Toronto. He studies the intellectual history of medieval and modern Islamic societies with a focus on the transition of the modern Islamic discourse. His project investigates the influence of the European thought, especially 17th and 18th century philosophy, on modern Islamic discourses. Mohannad also focuses on methods and theories in religion and intellectual history.

Miguel Ángel ANDRÉS-TOLEDO

University of Toronto

Miguel Ángel Andrés-Toledo is the FEZANA Professor in Zoroastrian Languages and Literatures in the Department of Near & Middle Eastern Civilizations at the University of Toronto. He has previously held academic positions at the Free University of Berlin, University of Copenhagen, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and University of Salamanca. Among other publications, he is the author of the monograph The Zoroastrian Law to Expel the Demons: Wīdēwdād 10-15. Critical Edition, Translation and Glossary of the Avestan and Pahlavi Texts. Iranica 23. Harrassowitz, Wiesbaden. He has worked on ten international projects in the fields of Old and Middle Iranian languages and literatures, Zoroastrianism and Indo-Iranian linguistics.

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.

Joel BLECHER

The George Washington University

Joel Blecher is Associate Professor of History at the George Washington University and the author of Said the Prophet of God: Hadith Commentary across a Millennium (University of California Press, 2018), which explores the rich history of the practice of hadith commentary in the times and places it flourished the most—classical Andalusia, medieval Egypt, and early modern India. Weaving together tales of public debates, high court rivalries, and colonial politics with analyses of ethnographic field notes and fine-grained arguments adorning the margins of manuscripts, this book opens new avenues for scholars who study commentary traditions over long periods of time and geographical expanses. An Arabic translation was recently completed by Dr. Ahmad Mahmud Ibrahim (Kuwait: Nohoudh Press, 2021).

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

Jonathan Brent is the project manager for Practices of Commentary. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Toronto’s Centre for Medieval Studies in June 2021. His research focuses on revisionism, periodization, and anachronism in late medieval history-writing. His dissertation is a comprehensive study of Nicholas Trevet’s Cronicles (c. 1334), an Anglo-Norman universal history most widely known for adaptation by Chaucer in the Man of Law’s Tale.

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, and Director of the Chinese-Jewish Conversation at Yeshiva University. Cohen has published five volumes on Jewish Bible interpretation in its Muslim and Christian contexts. Over the past four years, he has been teaching in China and exploring the dynamics of Chinese commentary on the classical Confucian texts—and parallels to developments in scriptural interpretation. This led to the establishment of the Chinese-Jewish conversation, which investigates these two traditions comparatively on topics ranging from archaeology, history and philosophy to environmental protection. See the link below.

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.

Anthony J. FREDETTE

University of Toronto

Anthony J. Fredette studied classical philology at Fresno Pacific University before pursuing an M.A. and Ph.D. at the University of Toronto’s Centre for Medieval Studies. His work centred on the editing of medieval Latin commentaries on classical poets and the influence which these texts exerted on medieval Latin, French, and Occitan literature. His dissertation, “The Medieval Thebaid,” applied these general concerns to the specific context of Statius’ epic poem on the theme of the Seven Against Thebes, revealing the crucial role played by medieval methods of reading and teaching the Thebaid on – among other genres – the birth of the Old French romance.

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.