Jan Loop
Professor of Early Modern History and Religious Cultures
Affiliation: NYU Abu Dhabi
Education: BA, University of Berne; PhD, University of Berne
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
Project: Recognizing Religions
About Jan
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'.
Publications
Books
Loop, Jan. Johann Heinrich Hottinger: Arabic and Islamic Studies in the Seventeenth Century. Oxford University Press, 2013.
Loop, Jan. Auslegungskulturen. Grundlagen Einer Komparatistischen Beschreibung Islamischer Und Christlicher Hermeneutiktraditionen. Peter Lang, 2003.
Edited Books
Loop, Jan and J. Kraye, eds. Scholarship between Europe and the Levant. Brill, 2020.
Leonhard Burckhardt, Lucas Burkart, Jan Loop, and Rolf Stucky, eds. Johann Ludwig Burckhardt – Sheikh Ibrahim. Entdeckungen im Orient um 1800 / Discoveries in the Orient around 1800. Christoph Merian Verlag, 2019.
Loop, Jan, Alastair Hamilton, and Charles Burnett, eds. The Teaching and Learning of Arabic in Early Modern Europe. Brill, 2017.
Journals
Loop, Jan. “Introduction: The Qur'an in Europe – The European Qur'an.” Journal of Qur'anic Studies 20, no. 3 (2018): 1-20.
Bevilacqua, Alexander, and Loop, Jan. “The Qur'an in Comparison and the Birth of 'scriptures." Journal of Qur'anic Studies 20, no. 3 (2018): 149-174.
Loop, Jan, ed. The Qur'an in Western Europe, special issue of Journal of Qur'anic Studies 20, no. 3 (2018).
Book Chapters
Loop, Jan and Federico Stella. “Across Confessional Boundaries. Bibliander’s Alcoran-Edition in Catholic Europe.” In The Qur’an in Rome. Manuscripts, Translations, and the Study of Islam in Early Modern Catholicism, 179-202. De Gruyter, 2024.
Loop, Jan. “Hiob Ludolf, the Qur’an, and the History of Writing.” In Hiob Ludolf and Johann Michael Wansleben, ed. Asaph Ben-Tov, Jan Loop and Martin Mulsow, 351-393. Brill, 2023.
Loop, Jan and Asaph Ben-Tov. “Scholarship and the Quest for Ethiopia in the Seventeenth Century. Hiob Ludolf and Johann Michael Wansleben.” In Hiob Ludolf and Johann Michael Wansleben, ed. Asaph Ben-Tov, Jan Loop and Martin Mulsow, 1–22. Brill, 2023.
Loop, Jan. “Travellers in Disguise – Europeans in Mecca and Medina 1500-1930.” In Hajj and the Arts of Pilgrimage. Essays in Honour of Nasser David Khalili, ed. Qaisra M. Khan with Nahla Nassar, 170-215. Gingko Library, 2023.
Loop, Jan. “Johan Jacob Reiske.” In Christian-Muslim Relations. A Bibliographical History, Vol. 14: Central and Eastern Europe (1700-1800), eds. David Thomas and John Chesworth, 192-209. Brill, 2020.
Loop, Jan. "A Polyglot Traveller in the Republic of Letters". In Scholarship between Europe and the Levant, eds. Jan Loop and Jill Kraye, 1-6. Brill, 2020.
Loop, Jan. “Maskerade in der Wüste. Sheikh Ibrahims Reisemethode im Kontext seiner Zeit.” In Johann Ludwig Burckhardt – Sheikh Ibrahim. Entdeckungen im Orient um 1800, eds. L. Burckhardt, L. Burkart, J. Loop and R. Stucky, 82-102. Christoph Merian Verlag, 2019.
Loop, Jan. “Language of Paradise: Protestant Oriental Scholarship and the Discovery of Arabic Poetry.” In Confessionalisation and Erudition in Early Modern Europe: An Episode in the History of the Humanities, eds. Nicholas Hardy and Dmitri Levitin. Proceedings of the British Academy. Oxford University Press, 2019.
Loop, Jan. “Islam and the European Enlightenment.” In Christian-Muslim Relations. A Bibliographical History, Vol. 13: Western Europe (1700-1800), eds. David Thomas and John Chesworth, 16-34. Brill, 2019.
Loop, Jan. “Johann Heinrich Hottinger.” In Christian-Muslim Relations. A Bibliographical History, Vol. 9: Western and Southern Europe (1600-1700), eds. David Thomas and John Chesworth, 906-914. Brill, 2017.
Video featuring Jan Loop
Scheich Ibrahim – Ein Basler Scheich im Orient (in German)
In the News
Dr. Jan Loop, along with an international team of researchers, will study how the Quran has been interpreted, adapted, and used in Christian Europe from the Middle Ages through to early modern history.
Episode 1: A Meeting of Cultures. London to Isfahan
The first episode focuses on the early modern period exploring the history of the Safavid dynasty (1501-1722); rituals and banquets at the court of Shah Abbas I (1571-1629); the architecture of Isfahan and English travellers to Isfahan.
UK Government Art Collection & Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art | October 7, 2019