Notes on Contributors
Elizabeth R. Alexandrin is an Associate Professor of Islamic Studies in the Department of Religion, and Senior Fellow at St. John’s College, University of Manitoba (Canada). She holds a Ph.D. from the Institute of Islamic Studies, McGill University (2006). Her first monograph is Walāyah in the Fāṭimid Ismāʿīlī Tradition, State University of New York Press (2017). Supported by SSHRC funding (Canada), she is co-editing a critical edition of Saʿd al-Dīn Ḥamūyeh’s Kitāb al-Maḥbūb, with Paul Ballanfat, Galatasaray University, to be published by E.J. Brill. Her current book project focuses on dreaming and sleeping in 13–14th-century Muslim societies, with a particular focus on Kubrawī Sufi texts and treatises, and with relevance to body histories.
Noah Gardiner is an Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at the University of South Carolina. His research is on Sufism, cosmology, the occult sciences, and manuscript culture in the late-medieval Arabic speaking Mediterranean, especially with regard to the science of letters and names (ʿilm al-ḥurūf wa-l-asmāʾ), a.k.a. “lettrism.” He is currently working on two monographs, one on the Sufi arch-lettrist Aḥmad al-Būnī and the other on the Cairo-centered occult renaissance of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries C.E. that reshaped Islamicate thought and culture for centuries after. He is also co-founder of the international workshop “Islamic Occult Studies on the Rise,” which helps cultivate emerging scholarship on the Islamicate occult sciences and related topics.
Ali Karjoo-Ravary is the Richard W. Bulliet Assistant Professor of Islamic History at Columbia University. His work lies broadly at the intersection of intellectual, social, and visual histories of premodern Islam. His publications have been featured in multiple venues, including the Journal of Sufi Studies and MAVCOR Journal. His current book project looks at Sufism, kingship, and poetry in the late medieval Persianate world. Before joining Columbia, he was the Josephine Hildreth Detmer and Zareen Taj Mirza Assistant Professor of Islamic Studies at Bucknell University. He completed his PhD at the University of Pennsylvania and has been a fellow at the Bard Graduate Center and the Wolf Humanities Center.
Evyn Kropf MSc (2009) is Librarian for Middle Eastern and North African Studies & Religious Studies and Curator of the Islamic Manuscripts Collection at the University of Michigan Library. As a specialist of Islamic codicology and Arabic manuscript culture, she has published several contributions including “Recalling Alikurna: “
Giovanni Maria Martini PhD (2014) is a Research Fellow at the University of Naples L’Orientale and a member of the ERC Project The European Qur’an (EuQu). From 2015 to 2018 he was postdoctoral fellow at the University of Oxford and at the Alexander von Humboldt Kolleg for Islamicate Intellectual History at the University of Bonn. In 2019 he was awarded a two-year individual research grant by the Gerda Henkel Foundation. His primary areas of interest are the history of Sufism, the history of the occult sciences in the Islamicate world, and Qurʾanic Studies. His publications include the book ʿAlāʾ al-Dawla al-Simnānī between Spiritual Authority and Political Power (Brill 2018).
Orkhan Mir-Kasimov is a Senior Research Fellow at the Institute of Ismaili Studies, London. Previously, he lectured at the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes and the National Institute for Oriental Languages and Civilisations (INALCO) in Paris and worked at various research centres in France and Germany, including the Institute for Advanced Study of Nantes and the Free University of Berlin. He was the recipient of an Alexander von Humboldt research fellowship in 2009 and 2010. Since 2020, he is the series editor of the Ismaili Texts and Translations Series published by the Institute of Ismaili Studies in London. He has published many journal articles and book chapters on various aspects of Islamic mysticism and messianism, focusing on the late medieval and early modern periods. He has edited and co-edited several volumes and authored Words of Power: Hurufi Teachings between Shiʿism and Sufism in Medieval Islam (2015) and Christian Apocalyptic Texts in Islamic Messianic Discourse (2017).
Sophie Tyser is a PhD candidate in Islamic Studies at the École Pratique des Hautes Études (EPHE) in Paris. She received a MA in Arabic language and literature from the Institut National des Langues et Civilisations Orientales (INALCO), as well as a MA in Historical, philological and religious sciences of the EPHE. She was previously a doctoral fellow at the Alexander von Humboldt Kolleg for Islamicate Intellectual History of the University of Bonn. Her research interests include classical Islamic thought and Sufism, with a particular focus on Ibn al-ʿArabī’s work.