Dr. Anna Ayșe Akasoy
KHK Visiting Research Fellow 2012KHK Visiting Research Fellow 2012
Associate Professor of Islamic Intellectual History, Hunter College, City University of New York, New York City, USA
Anna Ayșe Akasoy is currently Associate Professor of Islamic Intellectual History at Hunter College, New York. She studied Oriental studies, history and philosophy in Frankfurt and received her PhD in Oriental studies in 2005. Prior to her fellowship with us she was a research assistant at the Warburg Institute in the project ‘Islam and Tibet: Cultural Interactions, 8th-17th Centuries’, a lecturer in Islamic history and thought at the Oriental Institute (University of Oxford) as well as a British Academy postdoctoral fellow at the same institution.
Apart from many articles her monograph Philosophie und Mystik in der späten Almohadenzeit. Die Sizilianischen Fragen des Ibn Sab‘in (Leiden: Brill, 2006) is her most important work. Furthermore, she edited, translated and introduced Muhammad ibn Abdallah al-Bazyar’s Das Falken- und Hundebuch des Kalifen al Mutawakkil. Ein arabischer Traktat aus dem 9. Jahrhundert (together with Stefan Georges). She also translated al-Kindi’s First Philosophy into German (Freiburg: Herder, 2011).
During her fellowship she will explore the religious dimension of legends surrounding Alexander the Great in the medieval Islamic world.
Education
- Ph.D., Oriental Studies, Goethe University, Frankfurt/Main, Germany, 2005
- M.A., Oriental Studies, History and Philosophy, Goethe University, Frankfurt/Main, Germany, 2002
KHK Fellowship
Duration: January 2012 - December 2012
Project: Iskandar the Prophet: Religious Integration and the Alexander Legend in the Islamic World