Notes on Contributors
Hussein A. Abdulsater is Assistant Professor of Islamic Studies and Arabic Culture in the Department of Classics at the University of Notre Dame. His research focuses on the interaction between Islamic theology, classical Arabic literature, and historiography. His book Shiʿi Doctrine, Muʿtazili Theology was published by Edinburgh University Press (2017).
Mushegh Asatryan is Assistant Professor of Arabic and Muslim Cultures at the University of Calgary, Canada. His research interests include the religious, social, and intellectual history of the premodern Muslim Middle East. He is particularly interested in the history of Muslim sectarianism, Shiʿism, and the Nusayris. He is the author of Controversies in Formative Shiʿi Islam: The Ghulat Muslims and Their Beliefs (I.B. Tauris, with The Institute of Ismaili Studies, 2017), and a number of articles on early Islamic history.
Shahzad Bashir is Aga Khan Professor of Islamic Humanities at Brown University. He specializes in the intellectual and social history of Iran and Central and South Asia. He is currently finishing a book entitled Islamic Pasts and Futures: Conceptual Explorations that proposes new ways for making Islam an object of historical inquiry.
Jonathan E. Brockopp is Professor of History and Religious Studies at Penn State University. His primary research focus is on the literary remains of early Muslim cultures, including the Quran, hadith, and legal and theological texts. His most recent book is Muhammad’s Heirs: The Rise of Muslim Scholarly Communities, 622–950 (Cambridge, 2017).
Yousef Casewit is Chair of Islamic Studies and Assistant Professor of Quranic Studies at the University of Chicago Divinity School. His research areas include Quranic studies, medieval intellectual history of North Africa and al-Andalus, and Muslim perceptions of the Bible. His most recent book, The Mystics of al-Andalus: Ibn Barrajān and Islamic Thought in the Twelfth Century (Cambridge University Press, 2017) is an examination of the formative period of mystical discourse in Islamic Spain prior to the rise of Ibn Arabi.
Jamal J. Elias is Walter H. Annenberg Professor of the Humanities, Professor of Religious Studies and the Director of the Forum in Global Islamic Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. He is the author of numerous publications on a broad range of subjects relevant to the medieval and modern Islamic world. He is also an editor of Brill’s series Islamic Literatures: Text and Studies.
Janis Esots is a research associate at the Institute of Ismaili Studies (London, UK) and Associate Professor at the University of Latvia (Riga, Latvia), as well as the editor of the Islamic Philosophy Yearbook “Ishraq.” His research focuses on Islamic philosophy of the 15th–17th centuries (the so-called “school of Isfahan”) and Ismaʿili thought.
Li Guo is Professor of Arabic at the University of Notre Dame. Educated in China, Yemen, Egypt, and the United States, he is author of Early Mamluk Syrian Historiography: al-Yunīnī’s Dhayl Mirʾat al-Zamān (Brill, 1998); Commerce, Culture, and Community in a Red Sea Port in the Thirteenth Century: The Arabic Documents from Quseir (Brill, 2004); and The Performing Arts in Medieval Islam: Shadow Play and Popular Poetry in Ibn Dāniyāl’s Mamluk Cairo (Brill, 2012).
Matthew Ingalls is Associate Professor of Middle Eastern Studies at the American University in Dubai. His current research examines premodern Muslim commentary works and their role in intellectual change. In 2014, Matthew was a fellow at the Annemarie Schimmel Kolleg for Mamluk Studies in Bonn, Germany. He is currently coauthoring a book on the history of Islam in Egypt, which has been contracted for Princeton University Press.
Tariq Jaffer is Associate Professor of Religion at Amherst College, Massachusetts. His interests lie in the intellectual history of Islam, the Quran and its tradition of commentaries, and Islamic mysticism.
Mareike Koertner is Assistant Professor of Religion at Trinity College, Connecticut. She earned her PhD in Near Eastern Languages and Cultures from Yale in 2014. Her research interests are in hadith and sīra, with particular emphasis on epistemological discourses of prophecy, as well as the interaction and intellectual exchanges between monotheistic faith traditions in the medieval Near East.
Joseph Lumbard is Associate Professor of Quranic Studies in the College of Islamic Studies at Hamad bin Khalifa University in Doha, before which he taught at the American University of Sharjah, Brandeis University, and the American University in Cairo. He has also served as Advisor for Interfaith Affairs to the Jordanian Royal Court. His scholarship contributes to the fields of Islamic philosophical theology, Sufism, and Quranic studies. He served as author, translator, and managing general editor for The Study Quran (HarperOne, 2015). In addition to several articles in the fields of Quranic studies and Islamic thought, he is the author of Aḥmad al-Ghazālī, Remembrance, and the Metaphysics of Love (SUNY Press, 2016) and Submission, Faith and Beauty: The Religion of Islam (Zaytuna, 2009), and the editor of Islam, Fundamentalism, and the Betrayal of Tradition (2nd ed., 2010).
Matthew Melvin-Koushki is Assistant Professor of History at the University of South Carolina. He specializes in early modern Islamicate intellectual and imperial history, with a focus on the theory and practice of the occult sciences in Timurid-Safavid Iran and the broader Persianate world to the nineteenth century. His several forthcoming books include The Occult Science of Empire in Aqquyunlu-Safavid Iran: Two Shirazi Lettrists and Their Manuals of Magic, and he is editor of the special issue of Arabica volume Islamicate Occultism: New Perspectives (2017) and he is co-editor of the volumes Islamicate Occultism: New Perspectives (Arabica, 2017) and Islamicate Occult Sciences in Theory and Practice (Brill, 2020).
Mahan Mirza is Professor of Practice in the Keough School of Global Affairs at the University of Notre Dame. His doctoral work at Yale was on the medieval polymath al-Bīrūnī. He also holds an MA in Islam and Christian-Muslim relations from Hartford Seminary, Connecticut. He has edited two special issues of The Muslim World and has served as assistant editor for the Princeton Encyclopedia of Islamic Political Thought. He served as Dean of Faculty at Zaytuna College (2013–2016). At Notre Dame, after three years as lead faculty for the Contending Modernities “Madrasa Discourses” project with the Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies, he is presently serving as executive director of the Ansari Institute for Global Engagement with Religion.
Bilal W. Orfali is Professor of Arabic and Islamic Studies at the American University of Beirut. He specializes in Arabic literature, Sufism, and Quranic studies. He coedits al-Abhath journal and Brill’s series Texts and Studies on the Qurʾan. He is the author and editor of more than 20 books on a broad range of subjects relevant to Arabic and Islamic studies.
Gabriel Said Reynolds is Professor of Islamic Studies and Theology in the Department of Theology at Notre Dame. He is the author of The Qurʾan and the Bible: Text and Commentary (Yale University Press, 2018), The Qurʾān and Its Biblical Subtext (Routledge, 2010), and The Emergence of Islam (Fortress, 2012), as well as editor of The Qurʾān in Its Historical Context (Routledge, 2008) and New Perspectives on the Qurʾān: The Qurʾān in Its Historical Context 2 (Routledge, 2011).
Nada Saab is Associate Professor of Arabic Studies at the Lebanese American University. She is author of several books and articles on Arabic literature, both medieval and modern, and a translator of modern and contemporary Arabic drama.
Amina M. Steinfels is Associate Professor of Religion at Mount Holyoke College, South Hadley, Massachusetts. She is the author of Knowledge before Action: Islamic Learning and Sufi Practice in the Life of Sayyid Jalal al-Din Bukhari Makhdum-i Jahaniyan (University of South Carolina Press, 2012), focused on the life of a fourteenth-century South Asian Sufi master. She has also written on Islamic ritual, genres of Sufi prose in Persian, and the challenges of teaching about Islam in the current political context.
Alexander Treiger is Associate Professor of Religious Studies at Dalhousie University, specializing in Middle Eastern Christianity and Islamic studies. He is the author of Inspired Knowledge in Islamic Thought: al-Ghazālī’s Theory of Mystical Cognition and Its Avicennian Foundation (Routledge, 2012) and coeditor of The Orthodox Church in the Arab World (700–1700): An Anthology of Sources (Northern Illinois University Press, 2014).