Notes on Contributors
David Wilmsen (Ph.D. Arabic language and linguistics, University of Michigan) is an Arabic dialectologist with an interest in the place and development of Arabic dialects in the history and prehistory of the language. He has spent more than thirty years in the Arabophone world, teaching Arabic language and Arab culture topics. He has published research about Egyptian Arabic, Emirati Arabic, Levantine Arabic, Maltese, and Omani Arabic. Since 2009, he has been working with extensive recordings and their transcripts housed at the Sharjah Museums Authority (SMA), documenting pre-oil-era residents of old town Sharjah. Two full-length volumes are in preparation, one a classic dialectological study and the other a folk history of pre-oil-era Sharjah. He now lives in Amman, Jordan, pursuing research and writing about Arabic.
Nuha Alshaar (PhD. University of Cambridge) Professor of Arabic Studies, the American University of Sharjah, Director of the Centre for Arab Studies and Islamic Civilizations (CASIC). She has also taught at the University of Lisbon. She published Ethics in Islam: Friendship in the Political Thought of al-Tawḥīdī and His Contemporaries (2015); co-authored On God and the World: An Arabic Critical Edition and English Translation of Epistles 49–51 (OUP, 2019). She edited Muslim Sicily: Encounters and Legacy (EUP, 2024) and the Qur’an and Adab: The Shaping of Literary Traditions in Classical Islam (OUP, 2017). She has also published numerous articles and book chapters on different aspects of Islamic Civilization and intellectual thoughts.
Beate Ulrike La Sala (Ph.D. Philosophy, Freie Universität Berlin) is a digital humanities and research data consultant at Goethe Universität Frankfurt. She has been a research associate in philosophy and religious studies at Radboud Universiteit Nijmegen, the University of Potsdam, Freie Universität Berlin, and Humboldt University of Berlin. She was also a visiting scholar at the American University in Cairo and the University of Hamburg. Her research focuses on the shared intellectual traditions of Arabic, Hebrew, and Latin thought.
Dionisius A. Agius Fellow of the British Academy, Professor Emeritus of Arabic Studies and Islamic Material Culture, and Senior Research Fellow at the University of Exeter. Educated at the Jesuit Université St-Joseph, Beirut, Lebanon and the University of Toronto, Canada. A philologist and ethnographer specializing in Arabic historical, geographical and travel texts, he is committed to the study of maritime landscapes of the Mediterranean and the Indian Ocean. Author of numerous works.
Mario Kozah (Ph.D. Cantab) is an assistant professor of Islamic civilization at Qatar University. He has also held positions at the University of Cambridge and at the American University of Beirut teaching courses in Islamic studies, Islamic civilization, Syriac and Semitic studies, and Abbasid intellectual history. His publications include a trilogy: The Syriac Writers of Qatar in the Seventh Century; An Anthology of Syriac Writers from Qatar in the Seventh Century; and Dadisho Qatraya’s Compendious Commentary on the Paradise of the Egyptian Fathers in Garshuni (2014, 2015, 2016). His latest funded project entitled “A Preliminary Syriac, Aramaic and Arabic Lexical and Toponymical Survey of Beth Qaṭraye” produced two more publications including: Kozah, M., Kiraz, G., et al., (eds.), A Lexical and Toponymical Survey of Beth Qaṭraye (2021). He is also the author of a monograph on the Muslim polymath Abū Rayḥān al-Bīrūnī entitled The Birth of Indology as an Islamic Science. Al-Bīrūnī’s Treatise on Yoga Psychology (Brill, 2015), as well as an edition and English translation entitled The Yoga Sutras of Patañjali by Abū Rayḥān al-Bīrūnī with the Library of Arabic Literature (NYU Press, 2020). His latest article published in the Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies (2024) is entitled: “Chariots, mail coaches and wagons in the Arabic dialect of Qaṭrāyīth (“in Qatari”) in early Islamic eastern Arabia.”
Louise Gallorini (Ph.D. 2021), Arabic and Near Eastern Languages Department, American University of Beirut. Currently an independent researcher, she published “The Functions of Angels in Sufi Literature” (Brill, 2025).
Mohammad Sanaullah Al-Nadawi (M.A., Ph.D., Aligarh Muslim University) is Professor and Chairman of the Department of Arabic at Aligarh Muslim University, India. His 13 books cover the history of thought, East-West encounters, comparative literature, yoga, Sufism and philosophy, and include Dante, Europe and Islam (Aligarh: 2002), The Arab-Romance Parnassus (Aligarh: 2006), Existentialism in Arabic Literature (Aligarh: 2007), Perspectives on Postmodern Arabic Narrative (Aligarh: 2016), and Indian Islamic Culture (Beirut: 2022). He has over 200 papers published in Arabic, English and Urdu, and has attended more than 50 international conferences. He is the editor of the Journal of the Indian Academy of Arabic and is on the editorial boards of 20 national and international journals. Some of his accolades are the President of India Award, Maharishi Badrayan Vyas Samman (2007), and the Supreme Roll of Honor by the International Organization of Creativity for Peace, London (2020).
Victoria Penziner Hightower is a Professor of Middle East History and the Associate Director of Nationally Competitive Scholarships at the University of North Georgia. She is also the Chair of the Committee for Undergraduate Middle East Studies for the Middle East Studies Association of North America. Her publications focus on history, heritage, and memory of the pearl trade in the United Arab Emirates and the role of heritage in soft power politics in the Middle East.
Hager Ben Driss is an Associate Professor at the University of Tunis. She teaches Anglophone literature and her research interests focus on gender and postcolonial studies. She published several articles on Arabic and Tunisian literature and translated numerous Tunisian poems into English. Her work shows a keen interest in interdisciplinarity with a special focus on Mobility Studies. She is the editor of Mobilizing Narratives: Narrating Injustices of (Im)Mobility (2021). She has recently published Tunisian Women Novelists: Testimonies of Resistance and Resilience (2024).