Dr Belal Alabbas has been appointed to the post of Lecturer in Global Islam. Dr Alabbas is a historian of Islamic intellectual and legal thought (7th – 15th centuries) and publishes in the fields of Islamic law, sectarianism in the formative period, Islamic theology and Sufism, and the history of the hadith corpus. He received his doctorate in the Islamicate World from the University of Oxford in 2018 and has recently completed a project on ‘Law, Hadith, and Authority in the Shi’ite Tradition’ funded by a British Academy Newton International Fellowship at Exeter University. He is currently finalising his second book, on the life and thought of Muḥammad ibn Ismāʿīl al-Bukhārī (EUP 2023).
Dr Yael Shiri has been appointed to the post of Lecturer in Religious Studies. Dr Shiri is a historian of Indian religions specialising in Indian Buddhism. Yael’s work focuses on Indian religious narratives, both literary and visual, and their function as a vehicle for ideas, a tool for religious agency, identity formation, and religious polemics. In approaching these themes my work implements philological, narratological and art historical methods. My source material is mainly in Sanskrit, Classical Tibetan and Pāli. She gained her PhD from SOAS in 2020 and then held postdoctoral positions at the École françaised'Extrême-Orient (Paris), Tel Aviv University, and the Hebrew University (Jerusalem), before taking up his current post in Bristol in September 2022.
Dr Sig Sonnesyn has been appointed to the post of Lecturer in Medieval Christianity. Dr Sonnesyn is a historian of European high medieval religious and intellectual culture, its antecedents and wider intellectual geographies, specialising in the religious, moral, and scientific thought of European Latin culture and in cross-cultural relations between Christian, Islamicate and Jewish thought. He received his PhD in medieval history from the University of Bergen in 2007 and then held a postdoctoral fellowship at the Centre for Medieval Studies at Bergen, with subsequent postdoctoral positions at the University of Copenhagen, Durham University, and the University of Oslo, before taking up his current post in Bristol in September 2022.
