Past Projects
Isla
mAnatolia: The Islamisation of Anatolia, c. 1100-1500
This five year research project (2012-16) studies the transformation of Anatolia from a Christian to a predominantly Muslim society over the period c. 1100 to 1500AD. Whereas previous research has concentrated almost exclusively on conversion, this study also emphasises the importance of acculturation to Islam, and thus seeks to understand the processes through which Islamic culture took root among the recently converted Turkish as well as Christian populations. Very little is known of the spread of Islam in the region, and the nature both of the religion and culture of Muslim Anatolia is little understood, even though these transformations gave birth to the Ottoman Empire, which played a vital role in shaping European history, and ultimately Turkey itself.
http://www.islam-anatolia.ac.uk/
Arabic Cultural Semantics in Transition
The project explores the pivotal role of language consciousness in the history of Arab culture. It aims to study:
- the semantic development of the vocabulary of the Arabic language,
- philological discourses on the semantic changes in the language in the classical Arabic philological tradition (8th-10th centuries A.D.), and
- the impact of Arabic philology in the wider historical and cultural context of the Judaeo-Arab neo-classical heritage (12th-13th centuries A.D.) and Christian-Arab intellectual history on the eve of modernity (19th century A.D.).
http://arts.st-andrews.ac.uk/arsem/