Tarras, Peter

I studied Philosophy, Islamic Studies, and Near and Middle Eastern Studies in Kiel, Munich, and Sheffield. Whilst undertaking my doctoral research in the history of Arabic philosophy, I’ve always maintained a profound interest in pre-modern manuscript cultures, primarily in Arabic and especially of Christian and Jewish communities of the Islamic world. I approach them from the perspectives of material philology, book history, and provenance history. I have published on different aspects of textual transmissions with a focus on scribal culture, materiality, and textual practices as well as the emergence of manuscript collections. More recently, I became interested in the question of how the production of manuscripts and literary works relates to institutional settings. This is something I’m studying with respect to the production of early Christian Arabic monastic literature as well as within the ERC project MAJLIS, looking at Judaeo-Arabic works and their revisions authored by the members of the Qaraite dār al-ʿilm in 10th- and 11th-century CE Jerusalem. In January 2026, I was appointed project coordinator and senior researcher for the new Biblia Arabica Academies project. Previously, I have worked for the Arabic and Latin Corpus as well as the Arabic and Latin Glossary (Julius-Maximilians-Universität, Würzburg).

At the Institute of Near and Middle Eastern Studies at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität Munich, I have taught courses on different aspects of Middle Eastern Judaism, including Jewish philosophy in Hebrew and Arabic, Jewish manuscript culture, as well as Aramaic (including Syriac) language courses. I’m running an ongoing online reading group on the Arabic Bible.

In 2023, I launched the blog and resource site Membra Dispersa Sinaitica which is dedicated to the dislocated manuscripts of St Catherine’s Monastery at Mount Sinai, Egypt. With this project, I’m also committed to communicating research to wider audiences, something that I also do as the editor of the JAC Newsletter and the blogs hosted by the Munich Research Centre for Jewish-Arabic Cultures.

Areas of Interest

manuscript studies, book history, provenance history, material philology, Arabic Bible, Eastern monastic literature, philosophy in Arabic (Jewish, Christian, Muslim), research communication

Historical Periods of Interest

8th through 14th centuries; occasionally late 19th and early 20th centuries

Positions

Education

Awards and distinctions