Notes on Contributors
Ruth B. Bottigheimer
(D.A. 1981) is Research Professor at Stony Brook University, NY who studies ancient, medieval, and early modern brief narratives. Her monographs include Grimmâs Bad Girls and Bold Boys (1987), Fairy Godfather: Straparola, Venice, and the Fairy Tale Tradition (2002), Fairy Tales: A New History (2009), and Magic Tales and Fairy-Tale Magic (2014). She edited Fairy Tales and Society (1986), Fairy Tales, Printed Texts, and Oral Tellings (2007), and Fairy Tales Framed (2012). Articles, lectures, and book reviews treat relationships between written and oral story tellings, book and publication history, gender roles, illustration creation and publication.
Aboubakr Chraïbi
(Docteur ès lettres 1993) is Professor of Arabic Middle Literature at the Institut National des Langues et Civilisations Orientales in Paris, France. He conducted the Agence National de la Recherche research project âMille et une nuits: Sources et Fonctions dans lâIslam Médiéval Arabeâ and has published widely on The Thousand and One Nights, including Contes nouveaux des 1001 Nuits: étude du manuscrit Reinhardt (1996), Les Mille et une nuits: Histoire du texte et Classification des contes (2008), Trois contes inédits des Mille et une nuits (2015), and the edited volume Arabic Manuscripts of the Thousand and One Nights (2016).
Anne E. Duggan
(Ph.D. 1998) is Professor of French Studies at Wayne State University, Detroit, MI. Working between the French early modern tale tradition and twentieth- and twenty-first century French fairy-tale film, her most recent books include Queer Enchantments: Gender, Sexuality, and Class in the Fairy-Tale Cinema of Jacques Demy (2013) and The Lost Princess: Women Writers and the History of Classic Fairy Tales (2023). She edited A Cultural History of Fairy Tales in the Long Eighteenth Century (2021) and co-edited, with Donald Haase and Helen Callow, Folktales and Fairy Tales: Traditions and Texts from Around the World (2016).
Elene Gogiashvili
(Dr. phil. 2002) is Associate Professor of Folkloristics at Ivane Javakhishvili Tbilisi State University, Georgia. Her research focuses on comparative studies in Georgian, Caucasian, and international folklore and literature. She is the editor and co-author of the monograph Orient and Occident in Georgian Folktales: Oral and Literary Traditions (2019). Her articles have been published in international scholarly journals, including Folklore and Fabula. She is a member of the Europäische Märchengesellschaft, the International Society for Folk Narrative Research (ISFNR), and the Folk- and Fairy-Tale Studies Interdisciplinary Research Group at the University of Warsaw.
Bernard Heyberger
(Ph.D. 1993) is Professor Emeritus at the Ãcole des Hautes Ãtudes en Sciences Sociales (EHESS, Paris) and the Ãcole Pratique des Hautes Ãtudes (EPHE, Paris). As an historian and an arabist, he devotes his researches to the study of Eastern Christians under Islam, especially in Ottoman Syria, with a special focus on the dynamics of mobility, contact, opposition and mimicry between Eastern Christians and the West. He introduced and edited the first translation of ḤannÄ DiyÄbâs travelogue (in French), together with Jérôme Lentin and Paule Fahmé-Thiéry (2015).
Paulo Lemos Horta
(Ph.D. 2004) is Associate Professor of Literature & Creative Writing at New York University Abu Dhabi. He is the author of Marvellous Thieves: Secret Authors of the Arabian Nights (2017) and editor of Aladdin (2018) and The Annotated Arabian Nights (2021), with Yasmine Seale; Cosmopolitanisms (2017), with Bruce Robbins (2017); and Approaches to Teaching the 1001 Nights (2023). He has written for PMLA, Words Without Borders, The Los Angeles Review of Books and The Times Literary Supplement. His forthcoming monograph is entitled Rotten Little Worlds: World Literature in an Age of Nationalism.
Sylvette Larzul
(1949â2023) was an honorary Assistant Professor at the Institut des Mondes Africains in Aubervilliers. Her main fields of study were the history of Orientalism and the historical reception of Arabic culture in France. Her doctoral thesis, discussing the French versions of the Nights, was published in 1996 as Les traductions françaises des Mille et une nuits: Ãtude des versions Galland, Trébutien et Mardrus. Her last book, Antoine Galland écrivain: de lâérudition orientale aux Mille et une nuits (2023) also includes a discussion of ḤannÄ DiyÄbâs contribution to Gallandâs Mille et une nuit.
Ulrich Marzolph
(Dr. phil. 1981) is a retired Adjunct Professor of Islamic Studies at the Georg- August-University in Göttingen, Germany. His field of expertise is the narrative culture of the Muslim world. He has published widely on Persian, Arabic, and Turkish folktales and popular literature. His contributions relating to The Thousand and One Nights include The Arabian Nights Encyclopedia (2004; with Richard van Leeuwen) and the edited volumes The Arabian Nights Reader (2006) and The Arabian Nights in Transnational Perspective (2007). His most recent major publications are 101 Middle Eastern Tales (2020) and the comprehensive inventory The Arabic Fable (2025).
Johannes Stephan
(Dr. phil. 2016) is a scholar of premodern and early modern Arabic literature. He is currently the academic coordinator and general editor of the DFG-funded kalimat project at the Freie Universität Berlin that is to result in an online handbook on Arabic literary keywords from the pre-modern and early modern periods. He has previously worked at the FU as a PostDoc researcher in Beatrice Gruendlerâs research projects AnonymClassic and Arabic Literature Cosmopolitan scrutinizing the early Arabic reception (eighth to thirteenth centuries CE) of KalÄ«la wa-Dimna and its linguistic variation. He is the editor of The Book of Travels by ḤannÄ DiyÄb (2021).
Matthew Teller
(B.A. 1991) is a freelance author and journalist based in the UK. He writes about people, place, and culture for media and publishers around the world. Daybreak in Gaza: Stories of Palestinian Lives and Culture (Saqi Books, 2024), co-edited with Mahmoud Muna, Juliette Touma, and Jayyab Abusafia, was shortlisted for the Palestine Book Awards. A previous book, Nine Quarters of Jerusalem: A New Biography of the Old City (Profile Books, 2022), was a Telegraph Book of the Year. His next book Finding Aladdin: The Hidden History of a Syrian Storyteller (Profile Books, forthcoming 2026) profiles ḤannÄ DiyÄb.
Johannes Thomann
(Dr. phil. 1992) was a research fellow and librarian at the Oriental Institute/ Asia-Orient-Institute of the University of Zurich. His field of expertise includes the history of science in the Muslim world with a particular focus on astronomy/astrology. Concerning the textual history of The Thousand and One Nights, he has published several important contributions studying the hitherto largely unexplored role of the Ottoman Turkish versions of the Nights and the various versions for the conclusion of the Nights in Arabic manuscript tradition that is not extant in the oldest preserved Arabic manuscript used by Galland.
Richard van Leeuwen
(Ph.D. 1992) was a lecturer in Islamic studies at the University of Amsterdam. His main research fields are Middle Eastern history, Arabic literature, the history of orientalism, and the Hajj. His publications include Waqfs and Urban Structures: The Case of Ottoman Damascus (1999); The Arabian Nights Encyclopedia (2004; with Ulrich Marzolph); The Thousand and One Nights: Space, Travel and Transformation (2007); Narratives of Kingship in Eurasian Empires 1300â1800 (2017); The Thousand and One Nights and Twentieth-Century Fiction (2018; Shaykh Zayed Book Award 2020); and Hajj Travelogues: Texts and Contexts, from the 12th Century until 1950 (2024).
Christina Vogel
(Dr. phil. 1990) is Professor Emeritus of French and Romanian Literature at the University of Zurich, Switzerland. She is a specialist in eighteenth- and twentieth-century French literature and literary theory (semiotics, genetic criticism, comparative studies). She is a member of the âValéryâ team at ITEM in Paris and is responsible for the Revue des Lettres Modernes (Série Valéry). Her doctoral thesis focused on the aesthetics of Diderotâs Salons (1993) and her habilitation on Valéryâs Cahiers (1997). Her 2021 presentation âThe Image of the Orient in Antoine Gallandâs One Thousand and One Nights: Between Fiction and Realityâ is to be published.
James Weaver
(Ph.D. 2013), is a senior researcher in the History Department at the University of Zurich on the SNSF-funded project âHumility in Theory and Practice: Historical Approaches Across Cultures (1250â1500).â His main research fields are the intellectual history of the pre-modern Muslim world, especially as relating to the Shia, and Arabic literature. He is the author of The ShÄ«Ê¿a in Iraqi Heresiography: The Structure and Transmission of the Material up to al-AshÊ¿arÄ« (d.324/935) (2025) and the editor, together with Urs Gösken et al., of Mobilität des Denkens. Festschrift für Ulrich Rudolph (2025).
Hermann Zotenberg
(1834â1909) was a librarian at the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris. Concerning the textual history of The Thousand and One Nights, Zotenberg identified a âSyrian branchâ (to which the manuscript used by Galland belongs) and an âEgyptian branchâ (including the BÅ«lÄq and Calcutta II editions); the latter came to be known as Zotenbergâs Egyptian Recension (ZER). As part of an extensive essay published in 1887/1888, Zotenberg was the first scholar to draw attention to the notes in Gallandâs Journal, thereby creating awareness of the Syrian storyteller ḤannÄ DiyÄb, whose important contribution Galland had never publicly acknowledged.