Peter Verkinderen is an assistant professor at the Centre for Digital Humanities (CDH) at AKU-ISMC. He has an MA in Latin and Greek Literature and Linguistics, and an MA in Languages and Cultures of the Middle East (with a focus on Akkadian and Arabic), both from Ghent University (Belgium). He wrote his PhD on the evolution of the river landscape of southern Iraq and Khuzistan on the basis of Arabic texts and data from archaeological, geological and remote sensing research. He previously worked as an assistant director at the Netherlands-Flemish Institute in Cairo (NVIC) and in the ERC projects “The Early Islamic Empire at Work" (Hamburg University) and “KITAB – Knowledge, Information Technology and the Arabic Book" (AKU-ISMC).
His main expertise lies in in digital research methodologies and in the Arabic-language geographical and historiographical literature of the central Islamic lands of the third-fifth/ninth-eleventh centuries. He is interested in corpus building and developing new tools and methods for searching, analyzing and visualizing textual data; and in the use of AI for research, teaching and assessment.
Selected publications
Barber, M., Nigst, L., Qurboniev, A., Van Den Bossche, G., Verkinderen, P. (in review). Digital Explorations of Memory and Community Formation Through Text Reuse. Edinburgh University Press.
Verkinderen, P. (2015). Waterways of Lower Iraq and Khuzistan. Changing Rivers and Landscapes in the Early Islamic Middle East. I.B. Tauris.
Nigst, L., Romanov, M., Savant, S., Seydi, M. (2020-2023). OpenITI corpus. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.3082463
Verkinderen, P. (2022). OpenITI and the Fihrist. KITAB blog. https://kitab-project.org/fihrist/OpenITI-vs-Fihrist-part-1/
Hagemann, H., Verkinderen, P. (2021). Khārijism in the Umayyad Period. in A. Marsham (ed.), The Umayyad World (pp. 489-517). Routledge.
Verkinderen, P. (2020). Al-Maktaba al-Shamila: a short history. KITAB blog. https://kitab-project.org/Al-Maktaba-al-Shāmila-a-short-history/
Hagemann, H., Mewes, K., Verkinderen, P. (2020). Studying Elites in Early Islamic History: Concepts and Terminology. In S. Heidemann, H. Hagemann (eds.), Transregional and Regional Elites: Connecting the Early Islamic Empire (pp. 17-44). De Gruyter. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110669800-002
Haro Peralta, J., Verkinderen, P. (2016). Find for me! Building a Context-Based Search Tool Using Python. In E. Muhanna (ed.), The Digital Humanities and Islamic & Middle East Studies (pp. 199-231). De Gruyter.
