Department of History and Cultural Studies

Mathea Glaubitz holds a BA in Comparative Literature and Business Administration as well as a MA in Comparative Literature from Freie Universität Berlin. She worked as a student researcher for the project "Zukunftsphilologie: Revisiting the Canon of Textual Scholarship" initiated by Freie Universität and the Forum Transregionale Studien and directed by Prof. Dr. Islam Dayeh.

Albert Schlosser is a student of Arabic Studies at Freie Universität Berlin; he has spent over two years abroad in Tunisia for his Arabic language formation (Sousse University). In his academic research he focuses on literary writings in Arabic of the late Abbasid period.
At the Kalīla and Dimna research team, Albert Schlosser is responsible for manuscript transcriptions. His particular expertise is manuscripts written in Garshuni script.

Ulrich Marzolph served most of his professional life as a member of the editorial committee of the German-language Enzyklopädie des Märchens and adjunct professor of Islamic Studies at the Georg-August-University at Göttingen. His main area of interest is the study of Middle Eastern Muslim narrative culture. At the end of his career, he conducted his own research project, published in 2020 as 101 Middle Eastern Tales and Their Impact on Western Oral Tradition. Retired since 2019, he is currently working to finalize a number of research projects related to the study of Middle Eastern popular literature.

Rachel Peled Cuartas works on the Hebrew versions of Kalīla and Dimna and Barlaam and Josaphat (The Prince and the Monk), translating them to Spanish and English. She is founder, co-director and teacher of Ulpán Hebreo Sefarad and its Translation Workshop, Madrid, closely cooperating with Carlos Santos Carretero.

Oualid El Khattabi is responsible for the manuscript transcription team as well as the near-verbatim English translations for the Digital Edition.

Dima M. Sakran is a student researcher, she works on manuscript codicology data and their implementation in the project’s Digital Edition.

Project coordinator Agnes Kloocke is responsible for project and budget management as well as project events and public relations.

Ruslan Pavlyshyn is Ertegun Scholar at the Faculty of Oriental Studies, University of Oxford (Pembroke College), graduating in Islamic Studies and History.

Marwa M. Ahmed is responsible for the programming of the Preview Edition and all tasks related to the project’s Digital Humanities workflow.

Pascal currently works as an IT Architect for Department III of the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science (MPIWG), where he is responsible for the design and development of RISE & SHINE, a software suite for the secure decentralised exchange of open and licensed digital resources and which aims to facilitate and streamline humanities research through the use of digital tools.

Lecturer in Arabic (retired), Department of Near Eastern Languages and Cultures, University of California Los Angeles

KITAB provides a digital tool-box and a forum for discussions about Arabic texts. We wish to empower users to explore Arabic texts in completely new ways and to expand the frontiers of knowledge about one of the world’s largest and most complex textual traditions.

As a visiting scholar associated with the AnonymClassic project both in 2019 and 2020, Yoones Dehghani has since expanded his research on the Kalīla and Dimna tales to 6th century China.

Junior researcher Rima Redwan explores the manuscript illustrations within Kalila and Dimna traditions. She earned her MA in Arabic Studies specializing in manuscript studies.

Mahmoud Kozae provides the conceptual and computational framework for the project's Digital Edition .

Johannes Stephan explores the indirect transmission of Kalila wa-Dimna in Arabic from the 9th century onwards, focussing on the significance of linguistic variations and registers.

Khouloud Khalfallah curates the codicological analyses of the Arabic manuscript versions as well as the digital manuscript archive.

Theodore S. Beers, Persian and Arabic philologist, focusses on the transmission, translation, and continual reworking of material connected to Kalīla wa-Dimna, with particular regard to the interplay between the Arabic and Persian traditions.

Beatrice Gruendler is the Principal Investigator of the project. Both her philological expertise as well as her interest in Digital Humanities in the field of Arabic philology and Non-Latin Script Data are at the core of her research.

Asmaa Essakouti is a Postdoc researcher focusing on Premodern and Modern Arabic literature, Maqāmāt, Adab, Narratology, Fiction, and Nahda.
Her PhD thesis entitled ‘‘Realms of Strangers: Readers, Language, and Trickery in Maqāmāt al-Ḥarīrī” won her the admission to BGSMCS - Berlin Graduate School Muslim Cultures and Societies, and was additionally funded by a DAAD research grant. Asmaa Essakouti holds a master’s degree in Comparative Literature from the Doha Institute for Graduate Studies (“The genealogy of Voice; The book of those Without a Book”), as well as an MA in Arabic literature by the Moulay Ismail University, Morocco ("Metafiction and Question of Pleasure").

Senior Lecturer in Arabic and Islamic Studies at the University of Exeter, England.

Ignacio Sánchez, PhD (2012), University of Cambridge, is Senior Research Fellow at the University of Warwick. He has published on Arabic literature, institutional history, medieval geography, and medicine, and contributed to the new edition/translation of Ibn Abī Uṣaybiʿa’s ʿUyūn al-anbāʾ (E. Savage-Smith et al., A Literary History of Medicine, Brill, 2019). His current project, Streamlining Galen, funded by the Wellcome Trust, focuses on the transmission of Galenic texts in the form of summaries. He is also editor of the section of history of science in The Encyclopaedia of Islam Three, and executive editor of the journal Endowment Studies.

Pegah Shahbaz is Research Associate at the Asian Institute, Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy – University of Toronto, an Associate Member of the Centre d’Études et de Recherches sur l’Inde, l’Asie du Sud et sa Diaspora (CERIAS) at the Université du Québec à Montréal (UQAM) and the Section Editor of the Fables and Tales Chapter of the Perso-Indica Project. She specializes in Persian literature and works on questions of narratology, translation, and systems of knowledge transmission in the Persianate World, in particular the reception and domestication of Indian religious and cultural heritage in Persianate literary culture of Iran and Central and South Asia.

Jan has for many years been working on various Syriac projects at various universities. One central topic in most of these projects is Syriac as a bridge culture in the Middle east. Within the SFB 980 "Episteme in motion" J. van Ginkel works on the subproject "Verses and Sayings. Impetus and Range of Scholarly and Popularising Discourses in the Arabic World".

Until July 2019, Matthew L. Keegan worked on the theorization of fictive writing in pre-modern Arabic. He holds a PhD from New York University and an M.Phil from the University of Cambridge, UK, and is now the Moinian Assistant Professor in Asian and Middle Eastern Cultures at Barnard College of Columbia University.

The Center for Digital Systems (CeDiS) is the competence center for e-learning, e-research and multimedia at the University Library of Freie Universität Berlin. CeDiS supports all university institutions in the use of digital media and technologies in teaching and research.

Bibliotheca Arabica is dedicated to research on Arabic literatures dating from the years 1150 to 1850 CE, and combines literary and manuscript studies. Within this defined period of investigation, Bibliotheca Arabica focusses on literary production, transmission, and reception, and sets these in relation to the political and social transformations that were taking place at that time.

The research programme "Tradition manuscrite et transmission iconographique : les manuscrits à peintures de Kalîla wa Dimna à la Bibliothèque nationale de France" aims at the description and interpretation of the Arabic, Persian and Turkish manuscripts of Kalila wa Dimna preserved in the Department of Manuscripts of the Bibliothèque nationale de France.

LERA is an interactive, digital tool for analyzing variations between multiple versions of a text in a synoptic manner with several differences to other well-known collation tools. It was first developed for printed texts of the French Enlightenment within the SaDA-project at Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg and since then adopted to other texts and languages

Seeing in the rise of Digital Technologies an opportunity to re-assess and re-establish how the humanities can advance the understanding of the past and to support a dialogue among civilizations.