Professor Lejla Demiri
- CMR 1900 project
- Team Leader, Middle East and North Africa
- Section Editor, Turkish World
Lejla Demiri is Professor of Islamic Doctrine at the Centre for Islamic Theology, University of Tübingen.
She studied Islamic Theology in Istanbul (BA and MA at Marmara University) and Christian Theology in Rome (Post-Graduate Diploma and Licentiate at the Pontifical Gregorian University). She obtained her PhD from the University of Cambridge (2008), and worked as a Junior Research Fellow at Trinity Hall, Cambridge (2007-2010).
She subsequently held a post-doctoral fellowship (2010/11) at the Berlin-based research programme Europe in the Middle East – the Middle East in Europe (2010/2011) and Zukunftsphilologie fellowship (2011/12) at Free University of Berlin.
Her research explores Muslim-Christian theological encounters and she is the author of Muslim Exegesis of the Bible in Medieval Cairo: Najm al-Din al-Tufi’s (d.716/1316) Commentary on the Christian Scriptures (Brill, 2013).
Dr Claire Norton
- CMR 1900 project
- Section Editor, Turkish World
Dr Norton is Reader in History at St Mary’s University, Twickenham.
Dr Norton's works focuses on early modern Ottoman history. Her research interests include the processes and complexities of identity formation, conceptions of the religious other, motivations for religious conversion, and the political and social uses of narrations of the past. She is also the current Co-Director of the Centre for the Philosophy of History.
Dr Reza Pourjavady
- CMR 1900 project
- Section Editor, Persia
Dr Pourjavady is adjunct lecturer in Iranian religion and culture at the Goethe University in Frankfurt am Main.
Dr Pourjavady has a BA in philosophy from University of Tehran (1997), an MA in Islamic Studies from University of Leeds (2001), and a PhD in Islamic Studies from Freie Universität Berlin (2008). Between 2008 and 2013, he worked at the Institute of Islamic Studies, McGill University on the Institute's project, 'Rational Science in Islam'. He then moved to Berlin where he worked as a research fellow at Freie Universität Berlin (2013-2014).
His research interests include interreligious dialogue, post-classical Islamic philosophy, and the intellectual history of Shia Islam from the 1600s to the present day. He is the author of Philosophy in Early Safavid Iran: Iran: Najm al-Dīn Maḥmūd al-Nayrīzī and His Writings (Brill, 2011) and, with Sabine Schmidtke A Jewish Philosopher of Baghdad: ʿIzz al-Dawla Ibn Kammūna (d. 683/1284) and His Writings (Brill, 2006).
Dr Umar Ryad
- CMR 1900 project
- Section Editor, Arab World - Muslim Sources
Dr Ryad is Professor of Arabic and Islamic Studies (hoogleraar Arabistiek en Islamkunde) at the Faculty of Arts of the University of KU Leuven in Belgium. Previously he was an associate professor of Islamic Studies at Utrecht University.
Dr Ryad's PhD thesis, awarded in 2008 from Leiden University, was on Islamic Reformism and Christianity: A Critical Study of the Works of Muhammad Rashid Rida and His Associates (1898–1935). His research interests include modern Islamic intellectual and religious history, Muslim polemics on Christianity, the history of Christian missions in the modern Muslim world, and transnational Islam in interwar Europe. He is currently leading an ERC research project on the history of "Muslims in interwar Europe" (2014-2019).
Dr Carsten Walbiner
- CMR 1900 project
- Section Editor, Arab World - Christian Sources
Carsten Walbiner is currently based in Cairo and belongs to the Research Center for the Christian Orient at the Catholic University Eichstaett, Germany.
Carsten Walbiner has a PhD from Leipzig University, his thesis was on Macarius Ibn al-Za’im, a leading personality of the Greek Orthodox Antiochian Church in the 17th century (1995). Since then, he has devoted his scholarly activities to the history and literature of Arab Christianity during Ottoman times. He has published around 50 articles and papers. He is member of the editorial boards of “The Journal of Eastern Christian Studies” and “Parole de l’Orient”. Among his recent projects is the establishment of a catalogue of the Christian Oriental manuscripts kept at Andechs monastery in Bavaria and a handlist of the so far uncatalogued Christian Arabic manuscripts in possession of the Custody of the Holy Land in Jerusalem. A list of his publications can be viewed here.
