Philip Wood

Philip Wo​od ​

Biogra​​phy

Philip Wood is Tejpar Professor of Inter-religious studies. He holds a MA in History from the University of Cambridge and a MPhil in Byzantine Studies from Oxford. He completed his DPhil at Oxford on late Roman Syria. He worked at Oxford, SOAS and Cambridge before joining ISMC in 2012. Here he was MA Coordinator (2013-17) and was Head of Education and Acting Dean in 2023. He was given the AKU Research award in 2021 and the AKU Distinguished Leadership award in 2024. He is a member of the Academia Europeae, a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society and a Fellow of the Royal Asiatic Society.

​​​Philip’s research has focussed on the position of religious ‘minorities’ in West Asian empires in the period 500-1000. Much of this work has concerned Christian groups who use Syriac (a dialect of Aramaic) and/or Arabic. He has used sources in these languages to study how the leaders of subordinate groups reproduce or adapt discourses produced in the imperial centre, and his three monographs have considered this relationship in the Roman and Sasanian empires and in the Umayyad and Abbasid caliphates.

​​He is currently directing a research project funded by the Gerda Henkel Foundation comparing the formation of ethnic and religious groups in the Abbasid caliphate (750-1000). He is also writing a history of Christians in the Middle East for Polity press.

​​​His interests also extend to contemporary social integration and religious education in the UK and he has consulted for different branches of UK government and think tanks. He has written for a number of journalistic websites, including RE Online, Open Democracy, politics.co.uk, Middle East Eye and Le Point.

​​​​​

​​​Research ​interests​​​

  • ​​​Christians in the Middle East

  • Historiography

  • Hagiography

  • Ethnographic writing

  • Group Formation

  • Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages

  • Early Islamic History

  • Religious Education

 

Selected publicat​​​ions

  • Wood, P., We Have no King but Christ. Christian Political Thought in Greater Syria on the eve of the Arab Conquest, 400-c.585 (Oxford: OUP, 2010).
  • Wood, P., The Chronicle of Seert. The Christian Historical Imagination in Late Antique Iraq (Oxford: OUP, 2013).
  • Wood, P. (ed.), History and Identity in the Late Antique East (500-1000) (New York: OUP, 2013).
  • Wood, P., ‘Teaching early Islam in British HE’, British Journal of Religious Education 40 (2017), 1-12.
  • Wood, P., ‘A Christian re-telling of the Sira of Muhammad in the Chronicle of Seert’, al-Masaq 33 (2021), 156-68.
  • Wood, P., ‘Christianity in pre-Islamic Arabia and possible contexts for the Qur’an’ in G. Dye (ed.), Early Islam: The Sectarian Milieu of Late Antiquity? (Bruxelles: Éditions de l’Université de Bruxelles, 2022), 225-48.
  • Wood, P., The Imam of the Christians: The World of Dionysius of Tel-Mahre, 750-850 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2021).
  • Stenberg, L. and P. Wood (eds.), What is Islamic Studies? European and North American Approaches to a Contested Field (Edinburgh: EUP, 2022).
 

Personal Links​​

https://aku.academia.edu/PhilipWood​
 

Contact​​​ 

Philip.wood@aku.edu​​