School of Historical Studies

For a political scientist, the contradictory themes surrounding the Arabs and their region before the coming of Islam often seem strange and incomprehensible. Although there are no major barriers posed by rivers or mountain ranges, numerous...

In the year AD 79, Mount Vesuvius erupted with devastating force, burying the nearby town of Pompeii under more than thirty feet of volcanic debris. Pompeii was wiped off the map, yet below the surface the material remains of the town were preserved...

The Study of Pre-modern Hebrew Philosophical and Scientific Terminology as a new Chapter in the Intellectual History of Europe and the Islamicate World: PESHAT in Context. 

Speakers: Giuseppe Veltri (University of Hamburg), Reimund Leicht (Hebrew...

Ethiopia is unique in the world for the incomparable prominence of the cross in the life of its Orthodox Christian population. Crosses of unparalleled intricacy and sophistication are extensively used in religious and magic rituals, as well as in...

This talk deals tells the story of one of the leading achromatic-lens makers of the 19th century who revolutionized astronomy, the German optician Joseph von Fraunhofer, whose name is associated with the dark lines that transect the solar spectrum...

When, on an autumn Medina night in 61/680, the night that saw al-Ḥusayn killed, Umm Salama was torn from her sleep by an apparition of a long-dead Muḥammad, she slipped effortlessly into a progression of her co-religionists who, irrespective of...

How did orientalists read, learn languages, and produce dictionaries, editions, and other works? Annotated manuscripts in particular offer a glimpse into the orientalist’s study, showing the sources they used, their methods of deciphering texts and...

Competing theories about the origins of the cosmos have always entailed distinctive and often antithetical conceptions of who, or what, caused it. Sayf al-Dīn al-Āmidī developed his doctrine of creation at a particularly poignant moment in Islamic...