Emmy Noether Junior Research Group

Philip Bockholt

Philip Bockholt is Junior Professor for the History of the Turco-Persian world at the Institute of Arabic and Islamic Studies at the University of Münster (since October 2022). From 2022 to 2028, he will head the Emmy Noether Junior Research Group, “Inner-Islamic knowledge transfer in Arabic-Persian-Ottoman translation processes in the Eastern Mediterranean (1400–1750)”. He was formerly a research associate at the Institute of Oriental Studies at the University of Leipzig and received his PhD in Islamic Studies from Freie Universität Berlin in 2018. His PhD dissertation examined historiography in Iran in the early Safavid period (16th century) and provided an analysis of Khvāndamīr’s Ḥabīb al-Siyar (Beloved of Careers) and its readership. It was published in two separate volumes by Brill (Leiden/Boston) as Weltgeschichtsschreibung zwischen Schia und Sunna and Austrian Academy of Sciences Press (Vienna) as Ein Bestseller der islamischen Vormoderne in 2021–2. A series of research fellowships took him to Istanbul, Jerusalem, Madrid, Paris, Saint Petersburg, and Tokyo. In 2024, he completed his habilitation and obtained the venia legendi in Islamic Studies with his habilitation thesis, 'Nicht Wort für Wort übersetzt, sondern in schöne Worte gefasst': Übersetzer, Auftraggeber und Leserschaft von türkischen Fassungen arabisch-persischer Fürstenspiegel und Chroniken in der Frühen Neuzeit.

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Sacha Alsancakli

Sacha Alsancakli is a postdoctoral research associate at the Institute of Arabic and Islamic Studies at the University of Münster, working within TRANSLAPT. He received a PhD in Oriental Languages and Civilisations from Sorbonne Nouvelle University, Paris, in 2018, with a doctoral dissertation on ‘Sharaf Khān Bidlīsī’s Sharafnāma (c. 1005/1597): Composition, transmission, and reception of a chronicle of Kurdish dynasties between Safavids and Ottomans’. As a cultural historian of the early modern Turco-Iranian world, he notably researches historiography and the history of the book through the actors and processes involved in the production and circulation of manuscript texts. He has worked as a lecturer at Sorbonne Nouvelle University (2019–21) and at the Institut national des langues et civilisations orientales (since 2021), and he has published book chapters and articles in journals such as Eurasian Studies, Kurdish Studies Journal, and Die Welt des Islams.

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Kristof D’hulster

Kristof D’hulster is a postdoctoral research associate of the TRANSLAPT project at Münster University. Following his PhD on Turkic socio- and contact-linguistics (KULeuven, 2010), he has worked with the Research Foundation – Flanders (FWO) and with ERC projects in Ghent, Birmingham and Jena, and as a Humboldt fellow at the University of Bonn. While engaging with the socio-political and cultural history of the pre-modern Islamic world at large, within TRANSLAPT, he focuses on the role of translation in the shaping of Western Turkic literacy. His main publications are the monographs Browsing through the Sultan’s Bookshelves. Towards a Reconstruction of the Library of the Mamluk Sultan Qāniṣawh al-Ghawrī (Bonn University Press, 2021), and Ottoman Poets and Poetics in the Sixteenth Century. Introducing Aşık Çelebi’s and Latifi’s Biographical Dictionairies (E.J.W. Gibb Memorial Series/Edinburgh University Press, in press).

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Hicham Bouhadi

Hicham Bouhadi has been a research associate in the Emmy Noether Junior Research Group TRANSLAPT and a doctoral candidate at the Institute of Arabic and Islamic Studies at the University of Münster since October 2023. Within TRANSLAPT, he is currently working on his PhD dissertation on biographic and hagiographic works translated from Arabic into Ottoman Turkish. Hicham received his master’s degree in Islamic studies from the University of al-Qarawiyyin (Morocco) in November 2020. His master’s thesis examined Ibn Rushd’s critique of the atomistic theory of kalām. From May to October 2021, he was a research associate in a project on the reception of the legacy of John Philoponus in the Arabic tradition at Zayed University. During a longer stay in Turkey, he studied Turkish and Ottoman Turkish at Marmara Üniversitesi.

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Muhammed Sofu

Muhammed Huseyin Sofu has been a research associate in the Emmy Noether Junior Research Group TRANSLAPT and a doctoral candidate at the Institute of Arabic and Islamic Studies at the University of Münster since October 2023. Within TRANSLAPT, he is currently working on his PhD dissertation on hadith works translated from Arabic into Ottoman Turkish. After completing his bachelor’s degree in Islamic studies at 29 Mayıs Üniversitesi in Istanbul in 2021, he received his master’s degree in hadith studies at the same university in 2023. In his master’s thesis, he analysed Abū l-Shaykh’s (d. 369/979) work entitled Dhikr al-Aqrān wa-Riwāyātuhum ʿan Baʿḍihim Baʿḍā and examined the notion of mutual narration among contemporaries (riwāyat al-aqrān). Sofu’s interest in the hadith sciences focuses on the so-called hidden defects in hadiths (ʿilal al-ḥadīth), their principles (uṣūl), and the development of the science of hadith from a historical perspective.

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Associated researchers

Tobias Sick

Tobias Sick is currently working as a doctoral research associate at the Institute of Arabic and Islamic Studies at the University of Münster. Within the scope of the DFG Priority Programme 1981: “Transottomanica: Eastern European-Ottoman-Persian Mobility Dynamics” (2017–2023), he began working on his dissertation project titled preliminarily “Inner-Islamic Transfer of Knowledge in the Ottoman Empire: On Translations of Works of Islamic Mysticism within Transregional Sufi Networks in the Anatolian and Arab Provinces”. He received his master’s degree in the field of languages, history, and cultures of the Middle East from the University of Tübingen, during which he studied abroad at Tarbiat Modares University in Tehran and gathered work experience at the German Orient-Institut in Beirut. Having started his dissertation project at Leipzig University in 2020, he was also a member of the Graduate School Global and Area Studies there.

Ahmet Aytep

Ahmet Aytep is a doctoral research associate in the Cluster of Excellence “Religion and Politics. Dynamics of Tradition and Innovation ” at the University of Münster. Currently, he is working on his dissertation within the project “Arabic-Ottoman translations of works of Qurʾānic exegesis (tafsīr) as an expression of the inner-Islamic transfer of knowledge in the Eastern Mediterranean between 1400–1750”. He completed his master’s degree on Fakhr al-Dīn al-Rāzī’s perception of ʿAbd al-Qāhir al-Jurjānī’s concept of naẓm in 2018. In 2023, he obtained a PhD from İstanbul 29 Mayıs Üniversitesi where he also served as a research assistant from 2016 to 2023. His PhD dissertation dealt with the Nishapur circle of tafsīr with a particular focus on Abū l-Ḥasan al-Wāḥidī. Within the scope of the İSAM Late Classical Period Project, he has contributed to the critical edition of Şeyhülislâm Ebussuud Efendi’s 9-volume tafsīr, Irshād al-ʿAql al-Salīm ilā Mazāyā al-Kitāb al-Karīm. His academic interests in Islamic studies focus, in particular, on Qurʾānic exegesis, the Ottoman tafsīr genre, translation studies and Islamic manuscript culture.

Mercator Fellow

Andrew Peacock (St Andrews)

Andrew Peacock is Bishop Wardlaw Professor of Islamic History at the University of St Andrews and a Fellow of the British Academy. He was educated at the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge, and was previously employed as a Research Fellow at the University of Cambridge and as Assistant Director of the British Institute of Archaeology at Ankara. His research focuses on the pre-modern history and intellectual culture of the eastern Islamic world with a particular interest in manuscripts, and draws on sources in Arabic, Persian, Turkish and Malay. Recent publications include Arabic Literary Culture in Southeast Asia in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries (Leiden, 2024), Islam, Literature and Society in Mongol Anatolia (Cambridge, 2019) and The Great Seljuk Empire (Edinburgh, 2015). Questions of translation between Arabic, Persian and Turkish also formed the focus of his first monograph, Mediaeval Islamic Historiography and Political Legitimacy (London, 2007).

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Cooperation Partners

Hülya Çelik (Bochum)

Hülya Çelik is a junior professor of Turcology at the Institute for Arabic and Islamic Studies at the Ruhr University Bochum. She holds an MA and a PhD in Turcology from the University of Vienna, from which she graduated in 2016 with the thesis “Lobgedichte und andere Gedichte des osmanischen Dichters Keşfī (m. 1538–9): Versuch der Bestimmung eines 'unpopulären' Stils”. She worked as a research assistant in the project “Early Modern Ottoman Culture of Learning: Popular Learning between Poetic Ambitions and Pragmatic Concerns”, funded by the FWF (Fonds zur Förderung der wissenschaftlichen Forschung) from 2011–15. From 2017 to 2020, Çelik was a lecturer in Ottoman and Turkish language and literature at the University of Hamburg, and from 2018 to 2020, she was a research associate in the FWF project “The Oriental Outpost of the Republic of Letters. Sebastian Tengnagel (d. 1636), the Imperial Library in Vienna, and Knowledge about the Orient.” She teaches and researches Ottoman and Turkish literatures and manuscript cultures.

Her research areas and interests pertain to Ottoman and Turkish literatures and cultures, Turkish literature in the Armenian script (Armeno-Turkish), manuscript traditions and cultures and book printing in the Ottoman Empire, as well as the intersection of Digital Humanities and Ottoman studies.

Hülya Çelik is delighted to support TRANSLAPT with her expertise in Ottoman literature, Ottoman translation aspects, and manuscript traditions.

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Paula Manstetten (Bonn)

Paula Manstetten is Junior Professor of Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies at the University of Bonn (since April 2023). Previously, she was a postdoctoral researcher at the Institute of Oriental Studies and the Chair of Early Modern History at Bamberg University. She completed her PhD at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London, in 2018. Her research focuses on the pre-modern Arabic biographical and historiographical tradition as well as the history of Islamic education and hadith transmission. She has also conducted research on Arab Christians who worked as language teachers, translators, and librarians in early modern Europe. She is currently working on a new project on hagiographical biographies (manāqib). Given her interest in the reception and translation of such works in the Ottoman Empire, she is looking forward to a fruitful collaboration with TRANSLAPT. The TRANSLAPT team, in turn, hopes to benefit from her expertise in biographical dictionaries and hadith transmission.

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