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Transcript of the keynote speech: link.

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Nuria de Castilla is Professor of History and Codicology of the Book in the Islamicate World at the École Pratique des Hautes Études, Paris. She is the scientific coordinator of the ERC Project Saadian Intellectual Cultural Life (2016-2021), focused on the study of the Arabic Collection kept in the library of the Monastery of San Lorenzo de El Escorial. She researches the history of Arabic manuscripts, codicology, history of libraries, Islamic-Christian relations in the early modern period, Aljamiado literature, and production and transmission of the Qurʾān in the Western Islamic World. Her books include Edición, estudio y glosario del manuscrito aljamiado T19 de la Real Academia de la Historia (2005), Una biblioteca morisca entre dos tapas, Zaragoza (2010), Documentos y manuscritos árabes en el occidente musulmán (2010), and Qurʾanic Manuscripts in the Western Islamic World (special issue of the Journal of Qurʾanic Studies 19.3 (2017). 

François Déroche is Professor at the Collège de France and member of the Institute of the Académie des inscriptions et belles-lettres. He researches the history, text and transmission of the Qurʾān Arabic manuscripts. He has catalogued manuscripts at the Bibliothèque nationale de France and the Museum of Turkish and Islamic Arts in Istanbul. He taught the history and codicology of Arabic manuscripts at the École pratique des hautes études from 1990 to 2015. He is the author of Manuel de codicologie des manuscrits en écriture arabe (2000), Le Livre manuscrit arabe. Préludes à une histoire (2004), La Transmission écrite du Coran dans les débuts de l’islam. Le codex Parisino-petropolitanus (2009), Qur’ans of the Umayyads (2014) and Le Coran, une histoire plurielle (2019). 

Alain Fouad George is I.M. Pei Professor of Islamic Art and Architecture at the University of Oxford and a Fellow of Wolfson College. His research interests include Islamic calligraphy, early Qurʾans, Arabic illustrated books and early Islamic art and architecture. His books include The Rise of Islamic Calligraphy (2010), Midad: The Public and Intimate Lives of Arabic Calligraphy (2017), and Power, Patronage and Memory in Early Islam: Perspectives on Umayyad Elites (2018, co-edited with Andrew Marsham).

Konrad Hirschler is Professor of medieval Middle Eastern history (c. 1000–1500 CE) at the Freie Universität Berlin. His research interests include the history of the archive, manuscript studies, the history of the Middle East in the Crusader period, the comparative history of reading and the history of the book. He is the author of Medieval Arabic Historiography: Authors as Actors (2006), The Written Word in the Medieval Arabic Lands: A Social and Cultural History of Reading Practices (2012), and Medieval Damascus: Plurality and Diversity in an Arabic Library – The Ashrafīya Library Catalogue (2016), and Manuscript Notes as Documentary Sources (2011, co-edited with Andreas Görke). 

Evyn Kropf is Curator of the Islamic Manuscripts Collection and Librarian for Middle Eastern and North African Studies and Religious Studies at the University of Michigan Library. My research interests center around Islamic codicology and Arabic manuscript culture with a focus on writing material, structural repairs, reading and collecting during the Ottoman era, as well as the significance of pictograms and other visual content for Sufi knowledge transmission. She trained in manuscript studies and book structures with Adam Gacek and Julia Miller. From 2009-2012, she led the descriptive effort that resulted in the detailed cataloguing of 904 Arabic, Persian and Turkish manuscripts preserved in the University of Michigan Special Collections Research Center.

Kristina Richardson is Associate Professor of History at Queens College and the City University of New York Graduate Center. Her research in medieval Islamic history focuses on non-elites and people on the margins of society, including blue- and green-eyed people, disabled people, ghurabā’ Gypsies, craftspeople, and users of sign language. She is the author of Difference and Disability in the Medieval Islamic World (2012), a book in progress called Gypsies in the Medieval Islamic World: A History of the Ghurabāʾ (under contract with Bloomsbury Publishers), and, with Boris Liebrenz, an introduction and Arabic edition of Gotha MS orient. A114, the earliest known Arabic notebook of an artisan or merchant, entitled Notebook of the 16th-Century Aleppine Silk-Weaver Kamāl al-Dīn. 

Nur Sobers-Khan is Program Head, Aga Khan Documentation Center, Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Trained to work with manuscripts in Arabic, Persian, Ottoman Turkish and Urdu, she has been Curator for Collections from the Ottoman Empire and Turkey at the Museum of Islamic Art in Doha, Qatar, and Lead Curator for South Asia at the British Library. Her research interests include early Ottoman slavery, Safavid and Mughal albums, Qajar-era visual tropes, the circulation of manuscripts in the early modern Islamic world, and digital humanities. She is the author of Slaves without Shackles: Forced Labour and Manumission in the Galata Court Registers: 1560-1572 (2014) and Qajar Women: Images of Women in Nineteenth-Century Iran (2016, with Mounia Chekhab-Abudaya and contributions by Amélie Couvrat-Desvergnes and Stefan Masarovic).

Naïm Vantheighem is a Research Scholar at the Institut de recherche et d'histoire des textes (IRHT), a division of the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique in Paris. He is papyrologist and philologist who works with documents in Arabic, Coptic, and Greek. He held post-doctoral fellowships from the European Research Council and Princeton University before joining the IRHT in 2017. He is the author or co-author of dozens of articles on topics including multilingualism, law, scribal practice, early Islam, and governmental administration.

Jan Just Witkam is Professor Emeritus of Codicology and Paleography of the Islamic World at the University of Leiden and a pioneer in the study of Islamic manuscripts. His research interests include philology, textual criticism, the history of the book, Islamic codicology, book culture in the Islamic world and the approach and technique of premodern Islamic scholarship. He is the author of dozens of articles and several books, including Seven Specimens of Arabic Manuscripts Preserved in the Library of the University of Leiden (1978), Catalogue of Arabic manuscripts in the Library of the University of Leiden and Other Collections in the Netherlands (1982–), Duizend min één boek. De 1001 Nacht in de collecties van de Leidse Universiteitsbibliotheek: handschriften, tekstedities en vertalingen (1994, with A.J.M. Vrolijk and M.J. Klokke), and Tussen handschrift en druk. De produktie van het handgeschreven boek in het Midden-Oosten in een tijd van overgang (Between manuscript and printed book: The production of the manuscript book in the Middle East in a period of transition (1994). He is Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Islamic Manuscripts.