Loop, Jan

Professor of Early Modern History and Religious Cultures Affiliation: NYU Abu Dhabi
Education: BA, University of Berne; PhD, University of Berne

jl7590@nyu.edu

Research Areas: the intellectual, religious and cultural history of Europe and the Near East, with a special focus on Western knowledge of the Arab, Ottoman and Persian world between 1450 – 1800

After completing his PhD at the University of Berne (Switzerland), Dr Jan Loop was awarded a Frances A. Yates long-term research fellowship at the Warburg Institute, London. In September 2012 he joined the School of History at the University of Kent where he had a chair in early modern history. As of August 2020 he is a Professor of Early Modern History and Religious Cultures at the University of Copenhagen.

Jan is a founding member of the Centre for the History of Arabic Studies in Europe at the Warburg Institute and he was a Principal Investigator, between 2013 and 2016, for the European-funded collaborative research project Encounters with the Orient in Early Modern European Scholarship (EOS). Together with colleagues from Madrid, Nantes and Naples, Jan is leading the ERC Synergy Project The European Qur'an. Islamic Scripture in European Religion and Culture (1150-1850). The project is funded with €10m over six years (2019-2025). At NYUAD he has been involved in developing the research initiative “Recognizing Religion(s). The Cultural Dynamics of Religious Encounters and Interactions in Historical Perspective,” which will start with an online seminar series in the autumn of 2020.

His first book, Auslegungskulturen (2003), is a comparative study of Christian and Islamic hermeneutic concepts in early modern times. His second book, a monograph on the Reformed Church historian and orientalist Johann Heinrich Hottinger (1620-1667) and the significance of Arabic and Islamic Studies in the 17th century, appeared in 2013 in the Oxford-Warburg series.

Jan Loop is the general editor of Brill's series 'History of Oriental Studies'. Together with Alastair Hamilton and Charles Burnett he published, in this series, a paper collection on The Teaching and Learning of Arabic in Early Modern Europe (Brill, 2017). In 2018 he edited a special issue of the Journal of Qur’anic Studies on 'The Qur’an in Europe'.