The speaker, Sabine Schmidtke, is Professor of Islamic Intellectual History at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton NJ. Her research interests include Shīʿism (Zaydism and Twelver Shīʿism), intersections of Jewish and Muslim intellectual history, the Arabic Bible, the history of Orientalism and the science of Judaism, and the history of the book and libraries in the Islamic world. Her recent publications include Traditional Yemeni Scholarship amidst Political Turmoil and War: Muḥammad b. Muḥammad b. Ismāʿīl b. al-Muṭahhar al-Manṣūr (1915-2016) and His Personal Library (Cordoba 2018), Muslim Perceptions and Receptions of the Bible: Texts and Studies (Atlanta 2019, with Camilla Adang), Oxford Handbook of Islamic Philosophy (New York 2017, with Khaled El-Rouayheb), and Imāmī Thought in Transition: An Archaeological Inquiry into Texts and their Transmission (Córdoba: UCO; with Hassan Ansari; volume one currently in press).
The Gotha Research Library preserves the third largest collection of Oriental manuscripts in Germany. These approximately 3,400 manuscripts, most of which came into the library around 1800, are relevant to all fields of scholarship and shed light on the most diverse aspects of manuscript cultures. By inviting renowned researchers to the "Gotha Manuscript Talks", the Gotha Research Library would like to use the material in a webinar series to provide impulses for an increased exchange on manuscript cultures across disciplinary boundaries and to bring researchers and interested parties into conversation with each other about oriental manuscripts. The moderator is Dr Feras Krimsti, who is in charge of the library's collection of oriental manuscripts.