Paul Babinski *20

Paul Babinski (*20) is a postdoctoral researcher with the European Qur’an project at the University of Copenhagen. He is a historian of philology and literature whose work explores the scholarly culture of oriental studies in German lands and throughout Europe in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, with a focus on early modern Islamic manuscript collections and their orientalist readers. His dissertation, “World Literature in Practice: The Orientalist’s Manuscript between the Ottoman Empire and Germany”, reconstructs the emergence of early modern oriental studies as an encounter with a living Ottoman intellectual tradition. Currently, he is working on a monograph on the practice of reading the Qur’an in Western and Central Europe, surveying readers’ marks in Qur’an manuscripts and commentaries in early modern collections, and tracing the evolving approaches to orientalist Qur’anic study into the nineteenth century. His essay “Ottoman Philology and the Origins of Persian Studies in Western Europe: The Gulistān’s Orientalist Readers”, the first comprehensive study of the transmission of Persian literature into Western Europe through Ottoman literary commentaries, appeared in Lias, and an essay reconstructing the formation of the first German collections of Islamic manuscripts is forthcoming.

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