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).