Bibliotheca Arabica – Team: About Us

Team including research assistants at the Academy

Verena Klemm, Principal Investigator for the Bibliotheca Arabica project, is professor at the Institute of Oriental Studies at Leipzig University, a post she has held since 2003, and a member of the Saxon Academy of Sciences since 2017. She obtained her doctorate in Islamic Studies from the University of Tübingen in 1988 and her habilitation from the University of Hamburg in 1997, with a thesis on the discourse of literary commitment in the Middle East. Dr. Klemm is author of several works in the field of modern literature as well as in Šīʿī and Ismāʿīlī Studies. She is the director of several research projects related to the Oriental Manuscripts collection at Leipzig University Library, among them the Rifāʿīya, a private library from Ottoman Damascus, hosted in Leipzig since the 19th century.

Daniel Kinitz is Bibliotheca Arabica’s Managing Director (Arbeitsstellenleiter). He holds a PhD in Arabic Studies and Oriental Philology from Leipzig University. After working as an assistant at al-Azhar University in Cairo, he coordinated and managed manuscript database projects at the National Museum in Banda Aceh (Indonesia), Leipzig University, and the Free University of Berlin. In collaboration with The Islamic Manuscript Association in Cambridge, he implemented his own manuscript data project on the (Yemeni) Glaser Manuscripts, unifying data from the different Glaser collections.  In recent years he has focussed on his IT skills (Python, X technologies), working, inter alia, on bibliographic data extraction. Apart from his responsibilities as project manager, he leads the project’s manuscript data lab, implementing a collaborative workflow (automatic data extraction, quality assurance, and technology monitoring/testing). He is responsible for the project's research platform.

Stefanie Brinkmann is research fellow at the Bibliotheca Arabica project. She holds a PhD in Arabic and Islamic studies from the University of Göttingen. She was research assistant (Wissenschaftliche Assistentin) at the Institute of Oriental Studies in Leipzig, then acting professor at the Universities of Freiburg im Breisgau and Hamburg. With her special interest in manuscript studies, she has been a team member in a number of manuscript projects at Leipzig University Library (Principal Investigator: Prof. Dr. Verena Klemm), an active member and board member of The Islamic Manuscript Association (Cambridge) since 2008, and, since 2016, an active member and Principal Investigator for a project at the Centre for the Study of Manuscript Cultures at Hamburg University, funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG). Her main interests and areas of publication are manuscript studies, Ḥadīth, material culture (especially the history of food and drink), classical Arabic poetry, and Shīʿī studies. She is responsible for the research module On production, transmission, and reception of Arabic literature (Macro-Perspective).

Boris Liebrenz studied history and Arabic philology at Leipzig University and is a research fellow at the Bibliotheca Arabica project. His many publications explore documentary and manuscript sources from several eras, from early Arabic papyri to 18th-century merchant letters. In 2016, Liebrenz’s PhD thesis was published as Die Rifāʽīya aus Damaskus: Eine Privatbibliothek im osmanischen Syrien und ihr kulturelles Umfeld (Leiden: Brill) and was awarded the Annemarie Schimmel Research Prize in 2017. Recent projects include an edited volume The History of Books and Collections through Manuscript Notes (special issue of the Journal of Islamic Manuscripts, 2018), and a forthcoming edition and study of an Aleppine weaver’s notebook (with Kristina Richardson, to appear in the Bibliotheca Islamica series of the Orient Institut Beirut). After postdoctoral positions in Bonn, Berlin, and New York City, Liebrenz returned to Leipzig and the Bibliotheca Arabica and is working on the micro-historical sub-project Libraries between the Mamluk and Ottoman Era. His commitment, as well as his passion, is to unearth the history of manuscripts and collections, and to identify the people and institutions connected with them, through the wide variety of manuscript notes. In the coming years, he will continue to enlarge and publish his considerable collection of these documents. He is responsible for the research module On the reception and collection of Arabic literatures (Micro-Perspective).

Doctoral Researchers

Rawda El Hajji is a doctoral researcher at the Bibliotheca Arabica project (2024-). She studied History of Science at Fatih Sultan Mehmet Vakıf Üniversitesi, and Manuscript Cultures at the CSMC (Center for the Study of Manuscript Cultures), Universität Hamburg. She assisted in several projects cataloguing Morisco manuscripts, both in Andalusia and Timbuktu, under the Collège de France and the École Pratique des Hautes Études. Her PhD project aims to reconstruct the historical trajectories of the scattered library of a preacher at Buda's historical Great Mosque—Süleyman Efendi—against those of a contemporaneous analogue, so as to contextualize Süleyman Efendi's library within the historical ecosystem of libraries. Her aim is to interdisciplinarily map provenance history, bibliographic decisions, and the accumulation of historical activities to formulate insights into the social and cultural complexities of Ottoman Hungary as can be understood through library holdings.

Fatme El Bazzal is a doctoral researcher at the Bibliotheca Arabica project (2024-). She holds a Master of Arts in Information Sciences and a Bachelor of Arts in Library and Information Management from the Lebanese University. She has extensive library and archival experience, having worked as a Metadata and Reference Librarian at the Lebanese National Library, where she contributed to cataloging, policy development, and the relocation of the library’s collection. Fatme has also participated in archival projects like the Virtual Museum of Censorship with MARCH Lebanon and the Feminist Library of the Knowledge Workshop, as well as a project on the personal library and archive of the late Professor Hassan Chalabi, in Beirut. Her Ph.D. project focuses on the manuscript heritage of the Jabal ʿĀmil region, specifically the endowed collection of Asad Allāh ibn Muhammad Muʾmin al-Khātūnī al-ʿĀmilī in the Astān Quds Library, Mashhad, Iran which was donated in the year 1067 AH/1657 AD . Fatme's research explores the provenance history of this collection, placing it within the context of the migration of ʿĀmilī scholars to Safavid Iran, who attained various academic and administrative positions in the emerging Safavid state and played a significant role in reshaping the religious identity of the Safavid Empire.

Nadine Löhr was doctoral researcher at the Bibliotheca Arabica project (2020-2023) and a research associate at Communities of Knowledge at the Ludwig-Maximilians-University, Munich. Previously she worked as a coordinator for the DAAD multilateral Higher Education Dialogue Violence, Forced Migration and Exile: Trauma in the Arab World and Germany. Since 2017 she has been working as a research assistant at Ptolemaeus Arabus et Latinus (Bavarian Academy for Sciences and Humanities), where one of her tasks is preparing descriptions of Arabic manuscripts for the project’s catalogue. Her research focuses on the study of astronomical and astrological manuscripts and the ownership statements and marginal annotations contained within them. Her PhD thesis focuses on the dissemination and reception of the Arabic versions of Ptolemy’s Tetrabiblos and its commentaries, investigating the social and literary history of the most authoritative and influential text on astrology, based on manuscripts from the 11th to the 19th century.

Edin Muftić was a doctoral researcher at the Bibliotheca Arabica project (2020-2022). He studied history and archaeology at Zagreb University. He assisted in the cataloguing of the Arabic manuscripts in the Oriental Collection of the Croatian Academy of Sciences and Arts and was a member of the editorial board of the Encyclopaedic Almanac of Islam, the first encyclopaedic work on Islam in Croatian. His PhD project examines how Arabic was taught and studied in the Ottoman Balkans from the 16^th to the 19^th centuries. With manuscript data and manuscripts as his major source, his aim is to map the most important philological works in Arabic that were used in teaching institutions (above all, the madrasas) and to reconstruct concrete learning and teaching practices.

Student Assistants & Research Assistants

Ezis Issa, a holder of a Bachelor’s degree in Data Engineering from Tishreen University, serves as a research assistant in Bibliotheca Arabica’s manuscript data lab. Serving as a research assistant in Bibliotheca Arabica’s manuscript data lab, she channels her interest in computer science and DH technologies, particularly machine-based Arabographic OCR, pattern recognition, and automatic data extraction. Besides parsing manuscript catalogues, she works in collaboration with our data editors to train the latest segmentation and recognition models.

The manuscript data lab also includes Maryam Preusser and Sulamith Voppel among its members. Sulamith is currently pursuing her Masters in Arabic and Islamic Studies at the University of Leipzig and joined Bibliotheca Arabica in 2021. Maryam, who is enrolled in the Bachelor’s programme in Arabic and Islamic Studies at the same university, joined our project in October 2023. Their roles as research assistants and data editors involve extracting data from and organising semi-structured Arabic and Persian catalogues and other manuscript-related sources.

Vivienne Schommer holds a B.A. in Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies and Political Science from the University of Bern and an M.A. in Arabic and Islamic Studies from the University of Leipzig. At the Bibliotheca Arabica, she works as a research assistant for Prof. Dr Verena Klemm and Dr Stefanie Brinkmann, researching the manuscript cultures, e.g. women as well as the Ismāʿīlīs. She also assists the project’s manuscript data lab. She is currently working on a PhD project on early 20th-century Arab feminist periodicals.

Former Members
Dr Thomas Efer, Dr Tariq Yousef, Jonathan Schmid, Lisa Dorn, Serra Al Deen, Hala Al Kaisi, Anne Weber, Parivash Mashhadi, Barbara Paslar, Dorothea Schmidt, Lea Berenbrinker, Christoph Gümmer, Friederike Schmidt,Tobias Wenzel, Ossama Saker

More information

Introduction (main page)

Macro-Perspective: On the production, transmission, and reception of Arabic literatures

Micro-Perspective: On the reception and collection of Arabic literatures

Research platform: On people, books & notes

Activities

Latest Publications

Follow us on https://twitter.com/BibliothecaAra1

General Contact
Dr. Daniel Kinitz (Managing Director)
Saxon Academy of Sciences and Humanities
Nikolaistr. 6-10
04109 Leipzig/ Germany
Tel.: +49 341 7115328
kinitz@saw-leipzig.de