Field of Research:
Islamic Studies, Arabian Studies, Semitic Studies
In Germany:
01.10.2012 -
31.07.2013
Host's project description
Professor Stroumsa is one of today's leading scholars on philosophy and religious thought in the medieval Islamic world. Her books and articles are highly valued in the international community of scholars in the fields of Judaic and Islamic Studies as well as Medieval Studies. In July 2008 she was elected by the Senate of the Hebrew University as the institutions's new rector. This is the first time in the Hebrew University's history that a woman has been elected rector. The international standing of the nominee is clearly indicated by her membership on the editorial and advisory boards of several leading publications and academic steering committees in Jewish and Islamic Studies, both in Israel and abroad. To the extent possible, Stroumsa reaches out to Palestinian academia as well. Professor Stroumsa is regularly invited to international conferences and research groups abroad and in Israel, and she has herself organized numerous important events and research groups in her fields of interest in Israel. Her reputation as a scholar and teacher has led her to be invited regularly to give lectures and seminars around the world, and to spend extended periods abroad as research scholar. Stroumsa's main academic concern throughout her career is a multifocal approach to the intellectual history in the medieval world of Islam within the applicable multiconfessional cultural context. Over the last twenty years, Sarah Stroumsa has produced a prodigious output of scholarly articles and books (in English, Hebrew, French, and German; with translations of some studies into Arabic and Spanish) in the fields of philosophy and theology in Arabic in the early Islamic middle ages, medieval Judaeo-Arabic literature, medieval polemical and exegetical literature in Arabic, intellectual history of Islamic Spain, with special focus on the transmission of ideas between the religious communities. Her most recent monograph Maimonides in His World: Portrait of A Mediterranean Thinker (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009) in many ways stands for her mastery of both Islamic and Judaic Studies and for her exemplary multiconfessional approach.
Professor Stroumsa is hosted by Professor Sabine Schmidtke at Freie Universität Berlin. In Germany, she will primarily work on her project Thinkers of 'This Peninsula': New Perspectives in the Philosophy of al-Andalus, a comprehensive attempt to rewrite the history of philosophy of al-Andalus by viewing the various products of philosophy in the Iberian peninsula, Jewish, Muslim and Christian, as parts and stages of one common intellectual history and as a continuous development. The purpose of the study is to offer an integrative approach to the history of Islamic philosophy in Spain, with focus on the intellectual developments in al-Andalus in the context of the development of philosophical schools in the Orient. As such it will no doubt revolutionize modern scholarship on the intellectual history of al-Andalus.
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