Academic Bio
Professor Claire Gallien is Senior Research Fellow at Cambridge Muslim College, her research project covers the genre of tartīb al-‘ulūm (classification of the sciences) in the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Islamic world and the question of epistemic holism in Islam”. She received her PhD in English and Comparative Literatures and Studies at the Sorbonne. She also has training in Arabic and Islamic Studies from the Inalco and abroad (Cairo, Damascus, Sanaa, Birzeit, Beirut, and Tunis). Prior to joining Cambridge Muslim College, she was research and teaching fellow at the Zentrum für Islamische Theologie (Tübingen University, Germany) and has had more than ten years experience of teaching and research at the University of Montpellier and the CNRS (France). Her research interests are in Islamic epistemology and Islamic intellectual and religious history, Islamic literature and Sufism, British early-modern orientalism, with a focus on the constitution of Islamic manuscript libraries in early-modern Britain, decolonial thinking and translation. She has studied with Muslim scholars in Egypt, Turkey and the UK.
Education
- Professor, Sorbonne Nouvelle, Section 10 (Littératures Comparées), 11 (Études anglophones) and 15 (Langues, littératures et cultures africaines, asiatiques et d’autres aires linguistiques) of the Conseil National des Universités), 5th Jan. 2023 Title of the Habilitation: ““Orientalist, Postcolonial, and Decolonial Knowledges and Imaginaries in English Literature from 1636 to the Present”
- BA, Inalco, Arabic Studies, option Islamic Studies, 2016
- PhD, Sorbonne University, English Literature, Dissertation: “L’Orient anglais. Connaissances et representations de l’Orient dans la littérature britannique du XVIIIe siècle”. Summa Cum Laude. 2008
- Agrégation, ENS Lyon, 2005
- MPhil, Paris Diderot, English Literature 2004
- MA, Paris Diderot, English Literature 2003
- BA, Sorbonne, English Studies, 2002
- BA, Paris Nanterre, Philosophy, 2002
Research Interest
- Islamic epistemology and theology
- Islamic literature and Sufism
- 17th-18th cent. British Orientalism
- Decolonial Studies
- Postcolonial, World, and Comparative Literatures and Theories (South Asia and the Middle East)
Select Publications
Books
Taqsīm al-‘ulūm Literature in the Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Islamic World.
Classification, Friction, and Epistemic Holism in Islam (in preparation)
Appropriations and Reconfigurations of Arabic, Persian, and Indic Literares in Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Britain. Recreating the Canon, Oxford: Oxford UP, 2024.
Edited Volumes
“Islam and New Directions in World Literature,” Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2022. Access here
Articles in International Peer Reviewed Journals
“The Place of the Qur’ān and Islamic Theology in Ḥayy ibn Yaqẓān and its Early English Receptions: A Study in Textual Citation and Excision”, Philological Encounters 8.4 (2023). Access here
“From One Empire to the Next: The Reconfigurations of ‘Indian’ Literatures from Persian to English Translations”, Special Issue: Translation in India, guest editor Hephzibah Israel, Translation Studies 14.2 (2021): 225-241. OnlineFirst 24 Oct. 2019, Access here
Book Chapters
“God 99 – Staying with the Fragments, Designing Other Worlds”, in Handbook of Literature and Migration, edited by Corina Stan and Charlotte Sussman. New York: Palgrave, 2023, 533-548. Access here
“The Turkish Refugee as Vagrant Slave: Spaces of Disconnection and Dispossession in Ishmael Bashaw’s Refugee Narrative”, in Migration and Modernity: The State of Being Stateless, 1650-1850, edited by JoEllen Mary Delucia and Juliet Shields. London: Routledge, 2019, p.184-211. Access here
Dictionary Entries, Short Pieces, Interviews
St Andrews Encyclopaedia of Theology: articles on “Literature and Theology”, and “Sacred Time” (2024)
“Arthur John Arberry’s Interpretation of the Qur’ān (1955)”, Coran 12-21 (2021), Access here