Aziz Al-Azmeh received a D.Phil. in Oriental Studies from the University of Oxford having previously attended university in Beirut and Tübingen. He has been a long-term fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study, Berlin, and fellow of the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study and the Collegium Budapest , and was resident scholar at the Rockefeller Foundation Center for Scholars in Bellagio. He has taught at the Central European University since 2002, and previously at the American University of Beirut and the University of Exeter. He has been visiting professor at Yale University, Columbia University, the University of California, Berkeley, Georgetown University, and more recently at the Institute for the Study of Muslim Civilisations of the Aga Khan University (London) and the Institut d'Etudes Politiques, Paris. Professor Al-Azmeh has been invited all over the world for various conferences, talks, seminars, lectures and symposia. His latest book in English is The Emergence of Islam in late Antiquity (Cambridge University Press).
_______________________________________________________________________
Nadia Al-Bagdadi is Professor of modern Islamic History at the Department of History and the Center for Religious Studies at Central European University, Budapest. Her research and publications are in the field of socio-cultural and religious history of the modern Arab world, with special focus on cultural transfers and contacts, history of ideas, as well as gender in Ottoman-Arab world. The socio-cultural history of Arab printing, manuscript culture and knowledge in Arab modernity define a special place in her scholarship. Selected recent publications: ‘Registers of Arab literary History’, New Literary History 39, 3 (2008) 437-62, Vorgestellte Öffentlichkeit - Zur Genese moderner Prosa in Ägypten, 1860-1908,Wiesbaden: Reichert Verlag, 2010, “ Eros und Etikette – Reflexionen zum Bann eines zentralen Themas im arabischen 19. Jahrhunderts “ in: Verschleierter Orient – Entschleierter Okzident? J(Un)Sichtbarkeit in Politik, Recht, Kunst und Kultur seit dem 19. Jahrhundert. München: Fink Verlag, 2012, pp. 117-37. Nadia Al-Bagdadi, Barbara Winkler, Fawwaz Trabulsi (eds)., A Life in Praise of Words – Ahmad Faris al-Shidyaq,, Wiesbaden: Reichert Verlag. 2015.
______________________________________________________________________
Alba Fedeli is research fellow at the Centre for Religious Studies, CEU, Budapest, working on the transmission of early Qur’ānic manuscripts through phylogenetic analysis. She stirred up media frenzy after the BBC announcement that the “Birmingham Qurʾān” manuscript dates to Muhammad’s lifetime. She received her PhD from the University of Birmingham, after studies in Italy with Sergio Noja Noseda. She was drawn to Birmingham’s Cadbury Research Library after more than a decade spent studying early Qurʾānic manuscripts in locations as diverse as Sana’a, Cambridge, Doha, Dublin and St. Petersburg. Fedeli taught at the University of Milan from 2004 to 2012 and was Director of the Ferni Noja Noseda Foundation from 2004 to 2008.
Her publications reflect her research interests in early Qur’ānic manuscripts. Fedeli’s work on the Mingana-Lewis palimpsest has been uploaded on the Cambridge Digital Library (http://cudl.lib.cam.ac.uk/collections/minganalewis), establishing a pioneer system for encoding the text of early Qur’ānic manuscripts through TEI (Text Encoding Initiative). She is assistente accademico at the Ambrosiana Library and honorary research fellow of the Institute of Textual Scholarship and Electronic Editing (ITSEE) at the University of Birmingham, UK.
______________________________________________________________________
Mario Boffo is currently a consultant on international and business affairs, following a post as Ambassador of Italy, Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Italy, to the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and the Republic of Yemen (2005 to 2016). Throughout his diplomat career, he has served as Minister Counsellor in Canada, counsellor for the Italian Permanent Representation to NATO in Brussels, Diplomatic Protocol at the Foreign Affairs in Italy, and First Secretary to the Italian Embassy in Spain and Zaire (Democratic Republic of Congo). It was during his time as Ambassador of Italy to the Republic of Yemen that he became involved with the project overseeing the planning and management of the findings related to the manuscript discovered at the Great Mosque in Sana’a.
______________________________________________________________________
Barbara Bordalejo is a textual critic, editor and digital humanist. She has worked at four universities on two continents and in October 2014 she joined KU Leuven’s Literary Studies as the Digital Humanities specialist. She has edited Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, Darwin’s Origin of Species and have collaborated in the creation of editions of Dante’s Commedia, Boccaccio’s Teseida and 15th Century Castillian Cancioneros. She worked with Aengus Ward (University of Birmingham) in an Electronic Edition and Research Environment of the Estoria de Espanna and with Peter Robinson (University of Saskatchewan) in the Textual Communities Project, a tool for transcribing, collating and publishing texts. She is currently involved on the CantApp, an edition of the Canterbury Tales for mobile devices.
______________________________________________________________________
François Déroche is currently Professor at the Collège de France in Paris, teaching History of the Qur’an. He is a specialist of Arabic manuscripts, with a special interest for the history of the written transmission of the Qur’an. He has been a member of the Bibliothèque nationale staff, then of the French Institute in Istanbul before joining the Ecole pratique des hautes études. He has published on codicology (with other contributors, Islamic codicology. An introduction to the study of manuscripts in Arabic script, 2006) and early Qur’anic manuscripts (La transmission écrite du Coran dans les débuts de l’islam. Le codex Parisino-petropolitanus, 2009; Qur’ans of the Umayyads, 2014).
______________________________________________________________________
Andrew Edmondson (known as Ed) is an Advanced Application Specialist at the University of Birmingham specialising in high performance computing. He is also five years in to a part-time doctorate analysing methods for identifying genealogical relationships between biblical manuscripts. He has degrees in Maths and Theology and has worked for over 15 years as a technical team leader, software developer, system designer, integrator and researcher. His PhD research combines Greek biblical manuscripts, software development, data mining and phylogenetic techniques in an attempt to better understand how the thousands of extant biblical manuscripts relate to one another. For the last year he has been working with Dr Alba Fedeli to apply these same techniques to manuscripts of the Qur'an.
______________________________________________________________________
Yasmin Faghihi is Head of the Near and Middle Eastern (NE/ME) Department at Cambridge University Library, in charge of manuscripts, printed materials and related objects - traditionally classified as Islamic and early Christian. Cambridge University Library holds ca. 4500 NE/ME manuscripts datable from the 2nd-18th C., collected since the early 17th C., ca. 1500 Arabic fragments on papyri, parchment and paper, archives of famous Orientalists and Egyptologists and a minor collection of other objects. Her work on the Cambridge collections is driven by research needs and in support of teaching while taking part in establishing the Libraries’ digital scholarship initiative and working in closely with colleagues from the Cambridge Digital Library. Yasmin is co-chair of the FIHRIST board of Directors, working towards improved on-line access to manuscript collections, through a union catalogue, built on approved standards (TEI) and agreed practices. She also chairs the Middle East Librarians Committee (MELCOM) UK and is a member on the board of the Islamic Manuscript Association, fostering collaborations between institutions and cross disciplinary co-operations.
______________________________________________________________________
Frédéric Imbert is Professor of Arabic Language and Islamic epigraphy at Aix-Marseille University (France). He is now heading the Department of Arabic, Medieval and Modern Studies at the French Institute of the Meddle-East (IFPO) in Beirut, Lebanon. Specialist of Arabic and Islamic inscriptions, he teaches epigraphy and Arabic language. He has led numerous fieldworks and surveys in Jordan, Syria and Saudi Arabia since 1987, mainly in the desert steppes in order to gather Arabic inscriptions particularly from the first two centuries of Islam. He is currently undertaking a comprehensive study of Kufic graffiti to reveal the historical, religious, linguistic and palaeographical dimension of these graffiti. He is particularly interested in the private Qur'anic quotations found on the rocks along the pilgrimage routes. In 2014, he discovered, near Najran in Arabia, the earliest dated Arabic inscription.
______________________________________________________________________
Huw Jones is Head of the Digital Library Unit at Cambridge University Library, working with researchers, curators, and technical staff to make the Library's special collections accessible online. Cambridge Digital Library is our main platform for the digital humanities, freely accessible to anyone with an internet connection. It contains more than 30,000 items, ranging from the papers of Isaac Newton and Charles Darwin, to manuscript and photograph collections representing the global scope of the Library's physical collections.
______________________________________________________________________
Morteza Karimi-Nia (b. Qum, 1971) studied Islamic theology in a traditional manner in Qum Seminary (al-Ḥawza al-‘Ilmīyya) as well as “Qur’ānic and Ḥadith Studies” at the University of Tehran in an academic way. With his PhD about the Qur’ānic exegesis of the 4th century shi‘it scholar, al-Wazīr al-Maghribī, with more than 50 Persian, Arabic & English articles and some monographs about the Qur’ān, as well as a 12 years experience in teaching and researching in Islamic Azad University (Tehran), he is a recognized as a Muslim scholar in the fields of Qur’ānic studies in Iran. Due to his encyclopedic work Bibliography of Qurʾānic Studies in European Languages (Tehran, 2012), he has been engaged in western scholarship on the Qur’ān as well. Since 2012 he is involved in the field of Qur’ān-manuscripts studies. Now he is preparing two old Qur’ān manuscripts (one from Mashhad and the other from Najaf) to be published as facsimile edition.
______________________________________________________________________
Anna Kudriavtceva graduated from the Saint Petersburg State University (Faculty of Asian and African Studies): BA (Iranian Philology) (2008, Honours); MA (Cultures of Asian and African Countries) (2010, Honours). In 2007 she undertook an internship in Allameh Tabataba’i University, Tehran. Completed her postgraduate studies at the Peter the Great Museum of Anthropology and Ethnography (Kunstkamera) and prepared the PhD thesis “The Vocabulary of the Qur’an as a Source on Material Culture of Arabia at the Turn of VI—VII centuries”. Since 2010 she is Manuscripta Orientalia Editor (Web projects), since 2012 she is takingactive part in “Corpus Coranicum Petropolitana” International Research Project. She is the author of the series of articles connected with the Qur’anic studies and Sufi ritual and co author of the university textbook Chelovek v Korane i doislamskoj pojezii [Man in the Qur’ān and Pre-Islamic poetry], St. Petersburg: the Saint Petersburg State University; the Presidential Library (2016). Research interests: Qur’anic and Islamic studies, the Qur’an and pre-Islamic poetry, Muslim ritual.
Her contribution to this conference is the co-authored paper, presented by Efim A. Rezvan, entitled CORPUS CORANICUM PETROPOLITANA:current results and perspectives of the new Russian Qur’ānic project.
______________________________________________________________________
Efim A. Rezvan (born 1957), Editor-in-Chief of “Manuscripta Orientalia, International Journal for Oriental MSS Research”, Deputy Director, Peter the Great Museum of Anthropology and Ethnography (Kunstkamera) Russian Academy of Sciences, author of 14 monographs and more than 300 scholarly works published in the Russian, English, Arabic, French, German, Japanese, Italian, Uzbek, Finnish, Chinese and Persian languages. Since 2006 he is honorable professor of the UNESCO Chair for inter-religious dialogue for inter-cultural understanding (Saint-Petersburg). Main scientific achievements are connected with the study of archival and manuscript collections of St. Petersburg. He has lectured in the Oriental and Philosophical Faculties of the St. Petersburg State University, the Moscow Center of Stanford University (USA), Kazan Federal University and several other universities in Russia and abroad. Organized a number of historical and ethnographical expeditions in Central Asia, Arabia, India, Far East and Africa, a series of exhibitions worldwide and produced 10 documentaries devoted to the Muslim heritage.
______________________________________________________________________
Professor Saleh studied at the American University of Beirut (BA, 1989) and at Yale University (Ph.D. 2001). He is a specialist on the Qur’an, Tafsir and Islamic intellectual history. He has been a Kluge Fellow at the Library of Congress, a New Directions Mellon Foundation recipient, and a fellow at the Institute of Advanced Studies at LMU in Munich.
______________________________________________________________________
Eva M. Youssef-Grob studied General Linguistics in Zurich, followed by a PhD in Arabic Language and Literature at the same institution. Her doctoral thesis „Documentary Arabic Private and Business Letters on Papyrus. Form and Function, Content and Context“ was published 2010. It emerged in the Zurich/Munich research group of the Arabic Papyrology Database Project in which she was working from 2006 until 2016. Her interests in Arabic Papyrology are broad and cover besides different aspects of letter writing especially questions of palaeography and dating. This lead her into collaborating with Tobias Jocham, M.A. from the Berlin Coranica project in conducting a broad test series of radiocarbon dating on papyri and parchments (2013-2014). Its results are in press.
______________________________________________________________________