Research

Research focal points

The current research focuses within our department are:

• The social, political, intellectual and conceptual history of the Middle East, with an emphasis on issues of state formation, knowledge practices, historical consciousness, interdisciplinarity, sovereignty, religiosity, and language and text structures.
• The anthropology of the Middle East, with an emphasis on questions of love, sexuality, materiality, identity, gender and modernity.
• The construction, disclosure and preservation of corpora of sources and research data relevant to the study of the languages, cultures and societies of the Middle East, with an emphasis on epigraphy, historiography and documents in different languages ​​as well as on philology, bibliography and prosopography.

Research Funding Opportunities

Our department supports the development of a number of research fellowship applications for exceptional doctoral and postdoctoral candidates.

Projects

• EGYCLASS is an international and interdisciplinary project and network of researchers aimed at deepening the understanding of social hierarchies in Egypt.
• Egyptian Artists in Europe: Mobility, Resettlement and the Reconfiguration of Cultural Practices explores the ways in which Egyptian cultural artists are reinventing themselves and their practices in Germany and France.
• Hair, Identity, Beauty, and the Self in Muslim Contexts: Emotional Landscapes and Changing Femininities examines how body politics are negotiated in Egypt, Lebanon, the UAE, and Sudan.
• Islamic Endowments (Waqf) and State Formation in the Ottoman Empire (1450–1650) examines how endowments influenced the development of the Ottoman state over two centuries.
• The  Islamic History Open Data Platform  collects prosopographic, bibliographic, and textual datasets on elites and narrative sources from late medieval Egypt and Syria.
• From Mamluk History (1250–1517) to the History of the Sultanate of Cairo (ca. 1170–1517) examines the assumptions, stereotypes, and discourses that shape accounts of the premodern history of Egypt and Syria.
• The Mamlukisation of the Mamluk Sultanate II: historiography, political order and state formation in fifteenth-century Egypt and Syria examines the interplay between state formation and Arabic historiography in the late medieval Cairo Sultanate.
• Polymathy and Interdisciplinarity in Premodern Islamic Epistemic Cultures examines the interaction between the disciplines and genres of knowledge in the Islamic intellectual traditions between the 13th and 19th centuries.
• Universal historiography and millenarian kingship in late medieval Egypt and Syria: the third reign of al-Nasir Muhammad and the discourse of history examines Arab universal historiography at the court of the Cairo Sultanate in the first half of the fourteenth century.
• Weaving the Past into the Present: A Collaborative Artistic Research with and on Women Rug-Weavers in Northern Iran explores changing perceptions of rug weaving and its complicated relationship to women’s power in Iran.

Featured Publications

2024

Föllmer, Katja, Lisa Maria Franke and Ramzi Ben Amara. Rethinking the Anthropology of Islam: Dynamics of Change in Muslim Societies. In Honor of Roman Loimeier , Berlin, Boston: De Gruyter, 2024. 

The contributions in this book discuss the broad field of transformation processes in Muslim societies from different perspectives with different disciplinary approaches. In addition to methodological questions, the authors examine religious and social developments in Africa and the Middle East. Central themes are the production of meaning, the negotiation of religious values ​​and spaces, gendered agency and debates about identity.

2021

Van Steenbergen, Jo. A History of the Islamic World, 600-1800: Empire, Dynastic Formations, and Heterogeneities in Pre-Modern Islamic West Asia , London: Routledge, 2021.

This book offers a fresh and unique overview of the formation of the Islamic world and the major developments that marked the history of this broad region, from late antiquity to the early modern period.

Berriane, Yasmine, Annuska Derks, Aymon Kreil and Dorothea Lüddeckens (eds.). Methodological Approaches to Societies in Transformation: How to Make Sense of Change . London: Palgrave McMillan, 2021.

This book addresses the methodological challenges of studying social change using ethnographic methods.

Kreil, Aymon, Lucia Sorbera, and Serena Tolino. Sex and Desire In Muslim Cultures: Beyond Norms and Transgression From the Abbasids to the Present Day . London: Tauris, 2021.

This book explores the many forms that desire has taken throughout history in the Middle East and North Africa.

2018

Fortier, Corinne, Aymon Kreil, and Irene Maffi, eds.. Reinventing Love: Gender, Intimacy and Romance in the Arab World . Bern: Peter Lang, 2018

This anthology examines contemporary manifestations of love in Arab countries through ethnographic case studies.

2017

Van Steenbergen, Jo. Caliphate and Kingship In a Fifteenth-century Literary History of Muslim Leadership and Pilgrimage : a Critical Edition, Annotated Translation, and Study of Al-ḏahab Al-masbūk Fī Ḏikr Man Ḥaǧǧa Min Al-ḫulafāʼ Wa-l-mulūk . Leiden: Brill, 2017.

In this book, Jo Van Steenbergen presents a new study, edition and translation of al-Ḏahab al-Masbūk fī Ḏikr man Ḥağğa min al-Ḫulafāʾ wa-l-Mulūk, a summary history of the Islamic pilgrimage to Mecca by al-Maqrīzī (766–845 AH/ca. 1365–1442 CE).