overview and background
Brinkley M. Messick |
David Hollenberg |
François Burgat |
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Brinkley Messick specializes in the anthropology of law, legal history, written culture, and the circulation and interpretation of Islamic law. He is the author of The Calligraphic State (1993), which was awarded the Albert Hourani Prize of the Middle Eastern Studies Association, and co-editor of Islamic Legal Interpretation (1996). His scholarly articles include “Indexing the Self: Expression and Intent in Islamic Legal Acts,” Islamic Law & Society (2001); “Written Identities: Legal Subjects in an Islamic State,” History of Religions (1998); “Genealogies of Reading and the Scholarly Cultures of Islam,” in S. Humphreys,
ed. Cultures of Scholarship (1997); and “Textual Properties: Writing and Wealth in a Yemeni Shari a Case,” Anthropology Quarterly (1995). He is at work on a book on the doctrine and court practice of Shari`a law in the pre-revolutionary twentieth-century Islamic state of highland Yemen. He is also interested in a critical review of anthropology’s early disinclination, as a matter of disciplinary identity, to deal with written sources. He teaches courses on Islamic law; Islam and theory; and Muslim society. In 2009 he received the Outstanding Senior Scholar Award from the Middle East Section of the American Anthropological Association. |
David Hollenberg’s research interests include medieval Ismailism, modern Yemeni Zaydi scholasticism, and manuscript culture. His recent publications include The Yemeni Manuscript Tradition (Brill, 2015; editor with co-editors Sabine Schmidtke and Christopher Rauch) and Beyond the Qur'an; Ismaili ta'wil and the Secrets of the Prophets (University of South Carolina Press, 2016).
Professor Hollenberg is the founder of the Yemen Manuscripts Digitization Initiative (ymdi.uoregon.edu). YMDI is devoted to preserving the manuscripts of Yemen, the largest number of unexplored Arabic manuscripts in the world, and currently threatened by the war. Under his direction,YMDI received a $330,000 National Endowment for the Humanitites/Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft grant on behalf of Princeton University Library and Free University, Berlin, to digitize and disseminate 267 codices in private libraries in Yemen and from the collections at Princeton University Library and the Staadtsbibliothek, Berlin. |
François Burgat, born April 2 1948 in Chambéry, is a French political scientist and arabist, Research Fellow at the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS) posted at IREMAM (Institut de recherches et d'études sur le monde arabe et musulman) in Aix-en-Provence. He has been the Principal Investigator of the European Research Council research program "When Autoritarism Fails in the Arab World WAFAW" (2013-2017).
Having lectured across the world for a wide range of Academic institutions or think tanks such as the World Economic Forum, NATO, the European Union, etc.. He has taught and researched at the University of Constantine, Algeria (1973-1980), at the French CEDEJ in Cairo (1989-1993), as the director of the French Centre for Archaeology and Social Sciences in Sana'a, Yemen (1997-2003), then as the director of the Institut Français du Proche Orient (Syria, Jordan, Lebanon, Palestine, Irak) based in Damascus (2008-2012) and then Beyrouth (2012-2013). He is also a member of the European Council on Foreign Relations (ECFR). |
fuad al-shamiFuad Al-Shami received his Bachelor, Masters and P.h.d in Modern Contemporary Yemen History from Sana’a University. He teaches at the Department of History in the University of Sana’a, and works at the National Center for Documentation, he also works as a researcher in the Yemeni Archive and Ottoman Archives in Ottoman documents, he has several published books; Al-Mukhlaf Al-Suleimani, Yemen in the Ottoman Era, the relationship between the Ottomans and Imam Yahya in the state of Yemen, also he has published several research papers and is working on Arabic documents in the Ottoman Archive, Yemen Deputies in envoys to Istanbul, unearthing Oman’s documents in the Ottoman archives, Yemeni Hajj travels in second Othman’s rule, the role of the ruler of Zanjibar in the slave trade in East Africa, and others. He has participated in a number of local and international conferences and symposia. He is fluent in Ottoman Turkish, and English.
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Gabriele vom BruckGabriele vom Bruck received her university education at the London School of Economics from where she received a DPhil. She taught at the L.S.E. and the University of Edinburgh before joining SOAS in 2005. She has held visiting fellowship in Paris, Berlin and Princeton. She has conducted extensive field research in the Republic of Yemen. One of her major studies, Ruling Families in Transition: Islam, Memory, and Morality in Yemen (2005), analyses the ambivalent ways in which the ruling elite of the Yemeni Imamate, which had enjoyed exclusive rights to the leadership for about a millennium, was incorporated into the republic in the aftermath of the 1962 revolution. Her latest monograph, Mirrored Loss: A Yemeni Woman's Life Story (2019), tells the story of Amat al-Latif al Wazir, only daughter of 'Abdullah al-Wazir, the leader of Yemen's constitutional movement of the mid-twentieth century for reform of the autocratic imamate. The movement culminated in a failed revolt which led to the family's downfall. The study explores how violence translates into tragedy in the personal realm, and how individual lives and larger cultural and political worlds intersect in Yemen. Gabriele vom Bruck’s current research project looks at the nature of photographs as relational objects in the making and enunciating of personal histories, seeking to understand the relationship between memory and the materiality of the image.
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Kerstin HünefeldKerstin Hünefeld received her Magister (Islamic and Jewish Studies) and PhD (Islamic Studies) from Freie Universität Berlin and the Berlin Graduate School Muslim Cultures and Societies. During her PhD research, she studied Zaydi jurisprudence and manuscript reading with a private teacher and was an associated visiting researcher at the Yemen Center for Studies and Research in Sanaa. Kerstin Hünefeld taught at the departments of both Islamic and Jewish Studies at Freie Universität Berlin, the University of Potsdam, and UIN Sunnan Kalijaga State Islamic University in Yogyakarta/Indonesia. She held visiting fellowships at UIN and the Herbert D. Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. Kerstin Hünefeld is currently a postdoc fellow at the Martin Buber Society of Fellows at the Hebrew University Jerusalem. She has published a monograph and several articles on Yemen; a new monograph that looks at the (dhimma) relationship between Imam Yahya Hamid al-Din and the Jews of Sanaa from an Islamic legal point of view is in preparation. Kerstin Hünefeld’s new project examines conceptualizations of the Other and the Self in Islamic law and political thought.
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