Alba Fedeli

Board Member

Alba Fedeli is a Research Associate at the Asien-Afrika-Institut, Universität Hamburg, working on the transmission of early qurʾanic manuscripts. She received her Ph.D. from the University of Birmingham, UK, after studying in Italy with Sergio Noja Noseda. Fedeli stirred up media frenzy after the BBC announcement that the “Birmingham Qurʾan” manuscript dates to Muhammad’s lifetime. Her publications reflect her research interests in early Qurʾanic manuscripts. Her work on the Mingana-Lewis palimpsest has been uploaded on the Cambridge Digital Library.

Suleyman Dost

Board Member

Dr. Suleyman Dost is an Assistant Professor of Late Antiquity and Early Islam at the University of Toronto. He received his PhD from the University of Chicago in 2017. Dr. Dost’s research and teaching interests include history of late antique Arabia and Ethiopia, pre-Islamic Arabian epigraphy and Qur’anic Studies. He is currently completing a book manuscript on the historical, religious and linguistic context of the Qur’an’s origins through a study of pre-Islamic inscriptions from the Arabian peninsula.

Johanne Christiansen

Board Member

Johanne Louise Christiansen, Ph.D., is Assistant Professor at the Department of the Study of Religions, University of Southern Denmark. Her research focuses on the application of theoretical perspectives from other research fields, such as the study of religions, to the Qur’an. Among Christiansen’s recent work are the article “God Loves not the Wrongdoers (zalimun): Formulaic Repetition as a Rhetorical Strategy in the Qur’an” (Journal of Qur’anic Studies 22/1, 2020, 92-132) and the forthcoming book The Exceptional Qur’an: Flexible and Exceptive Rhetoric in Islam’s Holy Book (Gorgias Press, 2021).

Holger Zellentin

Chair of the Board

https://uni-tuebingen.de/fakultaeten/evangelisch-theologische-fakultaet/lehrstuehle-und-institute/religionswissenschaft-und-judaistik/religionswissenschaft-und-judaistik/zellentin-holger-prof-dr/

Holger Zellentin is Professor of Religion and Jewish Studies at the University of Tübingen. He holds a Ph.D. from Princeton University, and has previously held faculty appointments at the Graduate Theological Union and the University of California, Berkeley, at the University of Nottingham, and at the University of Cambridge. Zellentin works on Hellenistic and Rabbinic Judaism and on the relationship of the Qurʾan to late antique law and narrative. His publications include The Qurʾan’s Reformation of Judaism and Christianity: Return to the Origins, The Qurʾan’s Legal Culture: The Didascalia Apostolorum as a Point of Departure, and Rabbinic Parodies of Jewish and Christian Literature.

Johanna Pink

Board Member

https://www.frias.uni-freiburg.de/en/people/fellows/current-fellows/pink

Johanna Pink is professor of Islamic Studies at the Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg, Germany. She taught at Freie Universität Berlin and the University of Tuebingen. Her main fields of interest are the transregional history of tafsir in the modern period and Qur’an translations with a particular focus on transregional dynamics. She is the Principal Investigator of the research project “GloQur — The Global Qur’an” and general editor of the Encyclopaedia of the Qur’an Online. Her most recent monograph is entitled Muslim Qur’anic Interpretation Today (Equinox, 2019).

Shari Lowin

Board Member

https://www.stonehill.edu/faculty-staff-directory/details/shari-l-lowin/

Shari L. Lowin is Professor of Islamic and Jewish Studies in the Religious Studies Department of Stonehill College. Her research centers on the interplay between Islamic and Jewish texts in the early and early medieval Islamic periods, focusing mainly on exegetical narratives. She is the author of The Making of a Forefather: Abraham in Islamic and Jewish Exegetical Narratives as well as Arabic and Hebrew Love Poems of al-Andalus, a study of these exegetical narratives in the desire poetry of Spain. Her current project reexamines the qurʾanic verses attributed to the Jews in light of the midrash and piyyut. She is the editor of the Review of Qurʾanic Research.

Karen Bauer

Board Member

https://www.iis.ac.uk/people/dr-karen-bauer

Karen Bauer (Ph.D., Princeton University, 2008) is a Research Associate in the Qur’anic Studies Unit of the Institute of Ismaili Studies, where she researches the Qur’an and Qur’anic exegesis (tafsir). She has published widely on tafsir and on gender in Islamic thought and has recently begun a project on emotion in the Qur’an. Her publications include Gender Hierarchy in the Qur’an: Medieval Interpretations, Modern Responses, and Aims, Methods, and Contexts of Qur’anic Interpretation (ed.), and she has written articles on topics such as women’s right to be judges in medieval Islamic law, the potential and actual audiences for medieval tafsir, and the relationship between documentary evidence and tafsir in contracts of marriage.

Fred M. Donner

President

https://nelc.uchicago.edu/faculty/donner

Fred M. Donner is Professor of Near Eastern History in the Oriental Institute and Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations at the University of Chicago. His main field of research is the origins of Islam and early Islamic History. He is the author of Muhammad and the Believers: At the Origins of Islam and Narratives of Islamic Origins: The Beginnings of Islamic Historical Writing.