Assistant Professor Paul Babinski studies the intersection between the history of Christian-Muslim relations and material religion. His work focuses on scholarly practices and the manuscript transmission of religious and literary texts from Islamic Eurasia into Central and Western Europe from the medieval Arabic-Latin translation movement to the emergence of the modern disciplines of oriental studies in the nineteenth century. He is currently writing a book on the history of reading and translating the Qur’an in Europe, based on a survey of annotated manuscripts and printed editions. Recent publications include a contribution for the Encyclopaedia of the Qur’an on the history of non-Muslim Qur’an translation in Europe, a study of the use of looted manuscripts and Muslim captives in European Qur’anic study, an article on the formation of the first German Islamic manuscript collections, a case-study in the seventeenth-century European reception of Qur’anic exegesis, and a reconstruction of the role of Ottoman philology in the development of European Persian studies. Education Education: Ph.D., Princeton University M.A., University of Colorado - Boulder B.A., University of Colorado - Boulder Selected Publications Selected Publications: “The Orientalist Turn to Tafsīr: Abraham Wheelock’s Qur’an”, Christian Readings of Muslim Exegetical Sources in Interreligious Perspective, ed. Ulisse Cecini. (forthcoming) (with Jan Loop) “Non-Muslim European Translations of the Qur’an, 1143-1850”, Encyclopaedia of the Qur’an (2025) (with Jan Loop) “Looting and Learning: War and the Qur’an in European Oriental Studies”, Erudition and the Republic of Letters 9(3) (2024), 239-280. “The Qur’an as Turkish Booty (Türkenbeute)”, in The European Qur’an, edited by Jan Loop and Naima Afif. Berlin: De Gruyer, 2024, 55-65. “The Manuscript Catalog.” in Taking Stock: Media Inventories in the German Nineteenth Century, edited by Sean Franzel, Ilinca Iurascu, and Petra S. McGillen. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2024, 217-225. “The Formation of German Islamic Manuscript Collections in the Seventeenth Century.” In Sammler—Bibliothekare—Forscher: Zur Geschichte der orientalischen Sammlungen an der Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin, edited by Sabine Mangold-Will, Christoph Rauch, and Siegfried Schmitt. Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 2022, 19-44. “Ottoman Philology and the Origin of Persian Studies in Western Europe: The Gulistān’s Orientalist Readers.” Lias, Journal of Early Modern Intellectual Culture and its Sources 46(2) (2019), 233-315.
