The Shiʿi Studies Network is excited to announce a new lecture series, Reflections on Shiʿi Studies. The series aims to act as a forum for scholars working on the academic study of Shiʿi Islam to reflect on the state and fate of the field. Over the past few decades, scholarship on Shiʿism has grown significantly, with major contributions reshaping our understanding of the history and development of Shiʿi Islam from its emergence until the present day. However, dominant analytical frameworks still often reflect reductive assumptions, shaped by sectarian or minority-status framings. This series brings together leading scholars to critically reflect on these dynamics, share insights from their respective areas of focus, and propose new methodological and conceptual approaches to move the field forward.
Join us for the next instalment of this ongoing lecture series where we will be joined by Teresa Bernheimer, Research Fellow at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München (LMU).
The lecture will be held online over Zoom. To join, please register here and you will receive a link to join. You will need to register to attend the lecture. For those having difficulty registering with their institutional accounts, please use your personal email address to register instead. If you are still having difficulties, please get in touch.
Teresa Bernheimer
Research Fellow
Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München (LMU)
Teresa Bernheimer is a historian of the Middle East in the period ca 600 to 1200 CE. She is particularly interested in the formation of Islam in the context of Late Antiquity and beyond. From 2009-2017 she taught early Islamic History at SOAS, University of London, in the very department which had sparked her interest in the “Origins of Islam” during her BA. She received her MPhil and DPhil from Oxford. Her research has focused on the emergence of social and religious elites and their influence on the formation of Islam and Muslim societies; her book The Alids: The First Family of Islam, 750-1200 (Edinburgh University Press 2013) is a study of the descendants of the Prophet Muhammad, who came to be revered by both Sunnis and Shiʿites. Besides social history, she is interested in material evidence for the study of early Islam (particularly early Islamic coinage) and in approaches to and ways of teaching the history of early Islam. Together with Tamima Bayhom-Daou she edited four volumes on the early Islamic history (Early Islamic History, Critical Concepts in Islamic Studies, 4 vols. London 2013), and published a fifth revised edition of the widely used textbook Muslims: Their Religious Beliefs and Practices (with the late Andrew Rippin, London 2019). Teresa Bernheimer is currently at LMU Munich, where she is PI on the project Beyond Conflict and Coexistence. The Entangled History of Jewish-Arab Relations funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF). She is working on a project on Colour Terms in Judaism and Islam 600-1200. More recently, she has begun to turn her attention to Islamic tombstones as a source for investigating the history and historiography of the Middle East in the early Islamic period (Bernheimer/Korn, Der Islam 102, no. 1 (2025): 67–129, https://doi.org/10.1515/islam-2025-0004).