Dr. Teresa Bernheimer

The focus of my research lies in the multi-confessional history of the Near and Middle East between 600 and 1200. My central research interest is the cultural, linguistic, and religious transformation that reshaped the Middle East following the Arab conquests of the 7th century CE, and the ways in which this has been studied. Over the past two decades, I have developed three main areas of expertise, in which I have made a substantial and internationally visible contribution to the field (recognised in the 2025 Therese von Bayern prize 2025 for outstanding female researchers, and the 2026 DFG Heisenberg grant):

1. Social history of early Islam: A central strand of my research examines the mechanisms through which authority, legitimacy, and communal belonging were articulated in the early Islamicate world. My monograph The ʿAlids: The First Family of Islam, 750–1200 (Edinburgh, 2013) approaches the descendants of the Prophet Muhammad as an “Islamic aristocracy”, analysing genealogy as a social practice and structuring principle of early Islamic societies. By placing prosopography and social history at the centre of analysis, my work challenges sectarian and retrospective narratives of the first centuries of Islam and is recognised as a key contribution to a dynamic new research trend that emphasises prosopography in Islamic studies (reviews in BSOAS, Der Islam, AJIS, JAOS). This approach has also guided my research on the Kharijites (Gerda Henkel project, Extremism in Early Islam: The Kharijites in Comparative Perspective), a term used to describe some of the most extremist rebel movements of the early Islamic period. I am currently preparing a special issue on the history Kharijism with Hannah Hagemann which aims to broaden the chronological and geographical horizons of studies in the Kharijites. The volume will be published by BSOAS in 2028.
2. Material culture as a contemporaneous source base for the first centuries of Islam: Complementing this social history focus, my research has consistently emphasised the importance of material sources, particularly numismatics and epigraphy, as contemporaneous evidence for the formative period of Islam. In my teaching and through the organisation of training workshops for students and researchers (most recently, the LMU-Cambridge strategic partnership cooperation Epigraphic and Documentary Sources from Early Islamic Egypt: Tools and Skills for Graduate Students and Researchers), I have highlighted material sources as essential correctives to the limitations of the literary tradition, which privileges the retrospective viewpoints of a Muslim, male, and urban elite who codified the past in accordance with their own doctrinal or political aims. My work on coinage and early Islamic revolts (BSOAS, 2006), as well as my studies of early Islamic funerary epigraphy and tombstones (Bernheimer/Korn 2025; Bernheimer 2025a, 2025b), demonstrate how material culture allows for a more granular reconstruction of social, religious, and linguistic change, and a bottom-up perspective on Arabisation and Islamisation in the Middle East.
3. Historiography and the modern study of the Islamic past in a longue durée perspective: A third core area of my research concerns the ways in which the history of early Islam has been conceptualised, categorised, studied, and taught in the modern period. Providing students at all levels with the fundamental tools of historical inquiry has been a longstanding priority of mine (Bernheimer/Rippin 2019; Bernheimer/Bayhoum-Daou 2013). Through a source-based, diachronic and interdisciplinary approach, I question rigid disciplinary boundaries of period, language, and religion, and emphasise the palimpsest nature of the pre-modern Middle East. A longue durée perspective of the entanglement of traditions, which preserve, erase, or rewrite ideas and practices, was the subject of a research focus I lead together with Ronny Vollandt at the Munich Centre for Advanced Studies (Synopses and Lists: Textual Practices in the Pre-Modern World, 2023). The entanglement of Jewish and Arab relations has also been the focus of my project on Concepts of Colour in Judaism and Islam, 600–1200 (Bernheimer 2025c), part of the BMFTR-funded collaborative research initiative Beyond Conflict and Coexistence: The Entangled History of Jewish-Arab Relations where I have been leading a team of six postdoctoral fellows as PI. The project is currently in its transfer-phase, which I coordinate from Munich.

Teresa Bernheimer is a member of the Munich Research Center for Jewish-Arabic Cultures.