Bernheimer, Teresa

I am a historian of the medieval Near and Middle East, with a particular focus on the period between c. 600 and 1200 CE. My research explores the cultural, linguistic, and religious transformations that reshaped the Middle East following the Arab conquests, paying particular attention to the formation of Islam within the wider context of Late Antiquity and the multi-confessional societies of the medieval Middle East. My work combines social history, material culture, and historiography to investigate how religious communities, identities, and historical traditions emerged and evolved over time.

After studying History and Politics at SOAS, University of London, I completed an MPhil and DPhil in Oriental Studies at the University of Oxford, followed by a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship at Oxford (2006–2008). From 2009 to 2017 I taught the history of the early Islamic Middle East at SOAS, before moving to Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität Munich, where I have held successive research fellowships, including a Gerda Henkel Fellowship on the Kharijites and, since 2022, leadership of the collaborative research project Beyond Conflict and Coexistence: The Entangled History of Jewish–Arab Relations. In 2025 I was awarded the Therese von Bayern Prize for outstanding female researchers at LMU, and in 2026 included in the DFG Heisenberg Programme for my project The Middle East as Palimpsest: Tracing Layered Histories in Stone and Scholarship.

One major strand of my research examines the emergence of social and religious elites in the formative centuries of Islam. My monograph The ʿAlids: The First Family of Islam, 750–1200 (Edinburgh University Press, 2013), translated into Arabic, Persian, and Turkish, analyses the descendants of the Prophet Muhammad as an “Islamic aristocracy” and explores genealogy as a central organising principle of early Islamic society. More recently, I have extended this interest in authority, legitimacy, and communal identity through research on the Kharijites, challenging conventional narratives about one of the earliest and most influential rebel movements in Islamic history.

A second focus of my work is the study of material evidence for the first centuries of Islam. Coins, inscriptions, and tombstones provide contemporary evidence that complements—and often challenges—the later literary tradition. My early work on the coinage of the revolt of ʿAbdallah b. Muʿawiya demonstrated how numismatics can fundamentally reshape historical chronology and interpretation. More recently, my research has concentrated on early Islamic tombstones, investigating what funerary inscriptions and the tombstones as material objects reveal about everyday religious practice, language, memory, and processes of Arabisation and Islamisation. I am particularly interested in how material sources allow historians to recover voices and experiences largely absent from elite literary narratives.

Third, my research concerns the historiography of the medieval Middle East and the transmission of knowledge across religious and linguistic boundaries. My recent work examines the movement of ideas, texts, and concepts between Jewish, Christian, and Muslim communities, including collaborative projects on textual practices, colour terminology, and the entangled histories of Jewish–Arab relations. Rather than studying religious traditions in isolation, I seek to understand the medieval Middle East as a shared intellectual and cultural space in which ideas were continuously adapted, translated, and reinterpreted.

Teaching and public engagement remain central to my work. Throughout my career I have sought to make the early history of Islam accessible both to students and to wider audiences by introducing the methodological tools needed to navigate a field often shaped by modern assumptions and political debate. Together with Tamima Bayhom-Daou I edited the four-volume Early Islamic History: Critical Concepts in Islamic Studies, while with the late Andrew Rippin I prepared the fifth edition of the widely used textbook Muslims: Their Religious Beliefs and Practices. I continue to develop new forms of research training, most recently through the LMU–Cambridge Strategic Partnership workshops on Arabic documentary and epigraphic sources, which introduce graduate students and researchers to the use of material evidence for the study of the early Islamic world.