Konrad Hirschler is Professor of Islamic Studies at Universität Hamburg (Centre for the Study of Manuscript Cultures) and was previously Professor of Middle Eastern History at SOAS (University of London) and Freie Universität Berlin.
His research focuses on Egypt and Syria in the Ayyubid and Mamluk periods (c. 1200-1500) with a focus on social and cultural history.
Over the last years, he has primarily worked on the history of reading, of the book and of libraries with an emphasis on material culture.
He is amongst others author of A Monument to Medieval Syrian Book Culture – The Library of Ibn ʿAbd al-Hādī (2020), Medieval Damascus: Plurality and Diversity in an Arabic Library (2016), The Written Word in the Medieval Arabic Lands: A Social and Cultural History of Reading Practices (2012) and Medieval Arabic Historiography: Authors as Actors (2006) as well as co-editor of The Damascus Fragments: Towards a History of the Qubbat al-khazna Corpus of Manuscripts and Documents (2020) and Manuscript Notes as Documentary Sources, (2011).
