Our Team
Philip Wood
Philip Wood is the Tejpar Professor of Inter-Religious Studies at The Aga Khan University. He researches the history of West Asia from 400 to 900CE, with a focus on Christian communities in Syria and Iraq, and the wider dynamics of group identity formation. His books explore Syriac-speaking Christians under Roman, Sasanian, and Abbasid rule. His recent works include The Imam of the Christians (2021) and What is Islamic Studies? (2022).
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Post-Doctoral
Mehdy Shaddel
Mehdy Shaddel is a historian of early Islam and the Near East, focusing on the political, religious, and socio-economic history of the early Muslim empire. His work combines philology with broader themes such as apocalypticism, state formation, and comparative empires. He is currently working on a monograph on the Second Muslim Civil War (660-684 CE), as well as editions and translations of key Arabic texts, including Kitāb al-wuzarāʾ wa-l-kuttāb and Doctrina Iacobi nuper baptizati.
Bogdan Draghici
Bogdan Draghici is a postdoctoral Fellow paid for by funds from the Tejpar Professor in inter-religious studies. He is a specialist in Syriac studies and completed his DPhil in Oxford in 2023 with David Taylor on the subject of the eleventh century West Syrian theologian and polemicist Dionysius bar Salibi.
Samuel Noble
Samuel Noble received his PhD in Religious Studies from KU Leuven in 2021. He is particularly interested in the social and intellectual history of the Melkite community of Syria, the history of Byzantine Antioch and the Graeco-Arabic translation movement.
Yasmine Ilkhani
Yasmin Ilkhani is a Post-Doctoral Research Fellow at the Aga Khan University’s Institute for the Study of Muslim Civilisations (AKU-ISMC). Yasmin will be working with Professor Philip Wood as part of a research project on Group formation in the Abbasid period. Yasmin completed her BA at Shahid Beheshti in Tehran and PhD in Anthropology at Durham University. Yasmin specialises in the Zoroastrian community in Yazd in Iran.
Affiliated Researchers
Anna Chrysostomides
Anna is a Lecturer in Islamic History at Queen Mary - University of London. She researches religious conversion between Christianity and Islam in the 8th to 10th centuries - focusing on people who navigated both identities - such as converts, mixed families, and those involved in shared rituals.
Arash Zeini
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I am a historian and philologist of pre-Islamic Iranian cultures and languages - specialising in Zoroastrianism and the late antique interpretation of the Avesta. My research covers Sasanian religious culture, Middle Persian administrative texts, and digital humanities. As a postdoctoral researcher on the Invisible East project - I focus on Persian documents from 12th to early 13th century Iran and Central Asia - placing them within the broader aims of the Invisible East programme.
Aslisho Qurboniev
Aslisho Qurboniev is an Assistant Professor at the Institute for Ismaili Studies. He specialises in using digital methods to study the social and intellectual history of Muslim North Africa, especially on the scholarly networks and textual communities of Malikis under Fatimid rule in the tenth century. He holds a Phd from Cambridge and was formerly a member of the KITAB project, hosted at AKU-ISMC.
Edmund HayesEdmund Hayes is a historian of the medieval Middle East, specialising in Shi’i Islam, social institutions, and Islamic law. His research explores how beliefs, governance, and identity were shaped through practices like tax collection, excommunication, and regulation of social life. He works with Arabic and Persian sources to study these dynamics. At Radboud University, he researches water management in premodern Middle Eastern cities, focusing on Damascus and Islamic legal approaches to water use.
