I am a senior lecturer (assistant professor) at the Department of Comparative Religion and the principal investigator of the research project VISIONIS – “Visuality in the Qur’an and Early Islam” funded by an ERC-Starting Grant.
My work focuses on historical and literary studies on the Qur’an, Islamic exegesis, gender related studies in classical Islamic literature and visual and material culture studies. Primarily focusing on the transitional age from Late Antiquity to Islam, I am working to reconstruct processes of communication and knowledge transfer in single texts, between different texts, and between texts, images and objects. I also study how cultural, religious, and aesthetic norms are established and subverted. Hence, the analysis of texts from this period but also of later Islamic sources, in particular the relation between literary expression, schemes of persuasion, and theological concepts is one of the focal points in my research. Additionally, I am interested in problems arising from the encounter of different cultural hermeneutics in past and present, and the dynamics underlying the relations between texts, material objects and human practices.