Members

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.

Jonathan Brack is an Assistant Professor in the Department of History at Northwestern University. During the spring of 2026, he will be a Humboldt fellow at LMU. Brack is a historian of medieval Iran and the Mongol Empire. His research focuses on religious and scientific exchanges, conversion, and comparative empires. His first book is An Afterlife for the Khan: Muslims, Buddhists, and Sacred Kingship in Mongol Iran and Eurasia (University of California Press, 2023).

I am currently working as a student assistant at the Chair of Jewish History and Culture as well as at the Institute for Near and Middle Eastern Studies (Department of Jewish Studies) at Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich. At the same time, I am pursuing a bachelor’s degree in Middle Eastern Studies with a minor in History. In May 2025, I was awarded the Leon and Lola Teicher Scholarship by the Friends of Jewish History and Culture Association.

I am currently researching the Jewish polymath Moritz Steinschneider (1816–1907), who wrote approximately 1,400 articles and books in several languages, publishing in journals in a wide range of fields. He was the encyclopaedic “father of Hebrew bibliography” and a central figure of the “Wissenschaft des Judentums”, but no scientific biography of Steinschneider has yet been written. The first step in understanding the “cheminement intellectuel” is the compilation of a chronologically ordered bibliography, based on Steinschneider’s own article in the Bodleiana Catalogue (1852–1860) and on the bibliography of his disciple G.A. Kohut, published in the Festschrift of 1896. To cite Solomon Schechter (1847–1915), the Bodleiana Catalogue is “the work by which he will after all be best remembered, and which has become the Urim and Thummim of every Jewish student.”. The field of bibliography has changed in recent years and the Catalogue is no longer used as it was before. However, Steinschneider’s results are the foundation of all our databases in the field of Judaic studies. Without the great knowledge, experience, and accuracy of Steinschneider, many bibliographical questions would (still) be unresolved today.

Although the subject goes by different names in different places, I studied Semitic Studies wherever I went. Over the course of my studies, Biblical Hebrew, Judeo-Arabic, and manuscript work emerged as particular areas of interest.
To bring together these adjacent but distinct fields of scholarship, I wrote my doctoral dissertation on Ibn Ǧanāḥ’s Kitāb al-uṣūl. This dictionary of Biblical Hebrew, written in Judeo-Arabic in the eleventh century, is a seminal work of Hebrew lexicography whose influence extends well beyond the Middle Ages into modern times. Specifically, I produced a partial edition of the work, comprising the introduction and the letter א, together with an English translation. Because Ibn Ǧanāḥ’s lexicographical endeavours provide the backdrop for his extensive explanations of the biblical text, I also examined his approach to literal and figurative language in the Hebrew Bible, also clarifying how their relationship is reflected in individual dictionary entries. In addition, I studied his Arabic translations of the Hebrew Bible, analysing his translation technique.
In May 2026, I was appointed postdoctoral researcher for the new Biblia Arabica Academies project. Over the course of the coming years, my aims within the project are threefold: to provide a critical edition and translation of an Arabic translation of Song of Songs; to identify and record manuscripts containing Jewish-Arabic translations of the Hebrew Bible; and to manage the Biblia Arabica Bibliography.

I am a research associate in an international collaborative project funded by the DFG and the AHRC entitled “The History of the Jewish Book in the Islamicate World”. Within the project, I am also writing my doctoral thesis within a cotutelle program, co-organised by Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität (LMU), Munich, and the EPHE, Paris. My thesis aims at reconstructing the Jewish book trade in the Islamicate world from the late adoption of the (codices) format in the 9th to the 14th centuries, before the introduction of the first printing press. My research interests mainly focus on the history of Jews in the Near and Middle East. This interest led me to working intensively with manuscripts, which pathed my way to specialisation in Jewish book history, Jewish and Muslim codicology, and Hebrew and Arabic palaeography. Moreover, the work with manuscript collections led to my other research interest, the acquisition and collection history of manuscripts from the Near and Middle East.

My researcher’s heart beats for Iranian cultural history in the longue durée − in all its facets. From the use of tattoos throughout centuries and millennia to the longstanding tradition of Persian verse chronicles. Courses I taught and co-taught here in Munich include Truth and Lie, Order and Disorder. Iran from 2000 BCE until Today; Women in Iranian History; and Yeki bud, yeki nabud: History and Present of Iranian Arts in Exile. Some events I have held more recently include a workshop on Persian historiography in verse; and a film screening attended by the director Narges Kalhor. I also initiated the Norouz Lecture, which now takes place annually at the institute − a celebration of Iranian culture on occasion of the Iranian New Year!

My research also examines religious and literary interactions among Muslims, Jews, Christians, and Manichaeans. Currently, I study Judeo-Persian manuscripts of the Book of Proverbs and their potential dependence on Judeo-Arabic versions as part of the Cluster of Excellence Cross-Cultural Philology at the Ludwig-Maximilians-University in Munich.

I studied Bible, Jewish Philosophy, and Hebrew Literature at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, completing my BA and earning my High School Education Degree for Hebrew Literature. I completed one year toward a Master’s degree in Theater at Tel Aviv University.

I am a research fellow at the Unit of Judaic Studies at Ludwig-Maximilians-University Munich (LMU). I am director of the Old Synagogue – House of Jewish Culture in Essen and regularly teach Jewish Music (and Old Yiddish) for the Oxford Center for Hebrew and Jewish Studies, for the Aleph Cantorial Program, and the Other Music Academy – Yiddish Summer Weimar.

I am a senior research fellow of the Volkswagen Momentum programme “From Pre-Modern to Modern Perspectives in Judaic Studies”. My current research project, “A Language of One’s Own: Writing Politically in Judeo-Arabic, c. 1860–1950”, is a connected history of Judeo-Arabic political writing in and between the Maghrib and the Mashriq. It explores writers and writings that in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century recreated Judeo-Arabic as a language of political elaboration.

I am currently working as a student assistant on the ERC project “MAJLIS: The Transformation of Jewish Literature in Arabic in the Islamicate World” at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität (LMU), Munich. I began studying Middle Eastern studies and Islamic science at the University of Hamburg in 2016 and decided to resume my bachelor’s degree at LMU. I have always been very fond of learning new languages and after a student exchange to Israel in high school I decided I wanted to learn Hebrew and Arabic and learn more about the Middle East.

An Arabist by training (with an MA in Arabic Studies with minors in religious studies and political science, and an MA in Conference Interpreting (Arabic, German)), I am now pursuing my PhD in the field of the history and culture of the Near and Middle East, focusing specifically on Jewish-Arabic cultures.

My research focuses on the history of trans-denominational intellectual thought in the pre-modern Islamicate world. As a matter of methodological preference and historiographical priority, my studies cut across established disciplinary boundaries and transgress real or imaginary borders between religious communities and schools of thought.

I am interested in questions of historicization, historical consciuosness and, in particular, the dialectic between the continual return to a law and its deconstruction within the Jewish tradition since the Rabbinic period. In my Master’s degree, I focus primarily on Jewish language thought and Hebrew linguistics. In the future, I would like to expand my research to piyyutim, Kabbalistic language thought and Hebrew palaeography. I worked as a tutor for Modern Hebrew and participated in the project The History of the Jewish Book in the Islamic World.

I am working as a student assistant at the Institute of the Near and Middle East at Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich.

I am a PhD candidate and research associate with the ERC research project “MAJLIS: The Transformation of Jewish Literature in Arabic in the Islamicate World”. In my research, I am focusing on the institutional history of the Qaraite dār al-ʿilm and its scholarly culture within a broader historical context. I obtained my MA in Middle Eastern Studies at the Institute of Near and Middle Eastern Studies at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität (LMU), Munich, with a language emphasis on Arabic and Hebrew.<

I am a cultural and intellectual historian of medieval Jews in Muslim lands, with a strong focus on Qaraite Judaism. All my research is manuscript based. I hold a PhD in Hebrew Studies from Cambridge (2010), an MA in Jewish Studies (major), Islamic Studies (minor) and General Linguistics (minor) from the University of Cologne (2004) and a Diploma in Bio-physics from the Saratov State University, Russia (2000). In my PhD and early post-doctoral research, I studied Qaraite treatises on Biblical Hebrew grammar, focusing on the Qaraite approaches to Biblical Hebrew verbal morphology, and worked on the transmission of grammatical knowledge between the Muslim and the Jewish cultures. My more recent research has been on the history of the Jewish calendar, both Qaraite and Rabbanite, and the socio-historical implications of calendar diversity. In a separate project, I explored the possibility of using datable calendar fragments from the Cairo Genizah as points of comparison for handwriting analysis, a topic that bridged my interest in calendars and my fascination with Jewish manuscripts.