St Cross College, Oxford

MA (MA Köln; PhD Chicago); University Lecturer in Arabic/Islamic History; PI of the ERC-funded project IMPAcT

Phone: (01865) 278237
E-mail: judith.pfeiffer@orinst

External Website links:
Faculty of Oriental Studies
ERC Project IMPAcT

Dr Pfeiffer's research concentrates on the history of late medieval and early modern Islam, with a particular focus on the intellectual history of the 13th to 16th centuries. Having completed her M.A. at the University of Cologne and her doctorate at the University of Chicago, she has worked and studied for more than five years in the Middle East (Syria, Iran, and Turkey). She has published Twelver Shî‘ism in Mongol Iran (1997; ²1999), has edited or co-edited History and Historiography of Post-Mongol Central Asia and the Middle East (2006), Ghazal as World Literature II (2006), and Theoretical Approaches to the Transmission and Edition of Oriental Manuscripts (2007), and is editor of the Journal of Islamic Manuscripts. She is currently preparing for publication an annotated edition of an early 14th century composite work on philosophy and theology (Rashīd al-Dīn, Bayān al-Ḥaqā'iq), and works on a monograph on conversion to Islam in the Mongol Ilkhanate.

Dr Pfeiffer joined the Fellowship of St Cross and the Faculty of Oriental Studies in 2003, where she has held a number of academic, pastoral, and administrative roles. As a UL in Arabic/Islamic History, Dr Pfeiffer has taught a wide variety of undergraduate and graduate classes, including historical texts in Arabic, Persian, and Ottoman Turkish. She is an active supervisor and mentor of graduate, postgraduate and postdoctoral students and researchers, and was instrumental in reforming the M.Phil. in Islamic Studies and History, which she coordinated for four years.

Dr Pfeiffer has received numerous grants, awards and fellowships. Most recently, she was awarded a five-year European Research Council Starting Grant, which will support frontier research for the project 'IMPAcT - From Late Medieval to Early Modern: 13th to 16th Century Islamic Philosophy And Theology'. IMPAcT will make accessible the crucially important, but much neglected 13th-16th century history of thought of the Nile-to-Oxus region on a broad scale by establishing, through an integrated database on Islamic philosophy, theology, and adjacent fields, the bio-bibliographical data necessary for systematic research in these areas. The project will run until November 2015.