Contributors Dr. Barbara Roggema and Professor Alexandra Cuffel

Dr. Barbara Roggema is an expert on inter-religious contacts in the Islamicate world in the Middle Ages. She studied Arabic and Syriac at the universities of Groningen, Oxford, Birmingham and Cairo. After obtaining her PhD in 2007, she conducted research on religious encounters in the early medieval Middle East at King’s College London, among others. Since 2015, she has been working at the Center for Religious Studies (CERES) and researched Jewish-Christian relations in Arab-Muslim dynasties. Since autumn 2020, she has been working on the project “Armenia Entangled”.

Professor Alexandra Cuffel studied history in the USA and England and received her PhD from New York University in 2002. She conducted research at the Harvard Divinity School, among others. In 2012, she was appointed as professor for the Jewish Religion in Past and Present Times at the Faculty of History and the Center for Religious Studies. She received an ERC Consolidator Grant in 2015 for the project “JewsEast”. Since 2018, she has been director of the Käte Hamburger Kolleg “Dynamics of the History of Religion between Asia and Europe”, together with Kianoosh Rezania.

Within the ERC Grant for “Armenia Entangled”, led by Professor Zaroui Pogossian from the University of Florence, the researchers are investigating medieval Armenia as a space of cultural entanglements. The project starts in 2020.