BACKGROUND
Originally from Thessaloniki, I have lived in the UK—with some geographical interludes—since 1996. After studying Arabic and Islamic Studies at SOAS and Cambridge (where I took my PhD in 2006), I spent a peripatetic few years completing a number of research fellowships. I've held research fellowships at Gonville and Caius College in Cambridge, Orient Institut Beirut, Oxford Brookes University, and New York University Abu Dhabi. For two years I was also a teaching fellow at the much-missed European College of Liberal Arts in Berlin (now Bard College Berlin). At present, I'm based at the Department of Theology and Religion at the University of Birmingham as a Senior Lecturer and Birmingham Fellow in philosophical theology.
Current work
One of the ways I'll be filling out this role over the next few years is by exploring the theories of virtue developed by philosophers and theologians in the classical period of Islam. My hope is to place these theories in conversation with the broader history of the virtues outside the Muslim world. As part of this ambition, I'm currently working on a project investigating the intellectual history of one of the most distinctive but also most contested virtues that formed part of the ancient ethical tradition, magnanimity or greatness of soul. At the same time, I'm at work on a study of the ethical ideas of the great Muslim intellectual Abū Ḥāmid al-Ghazālī.
Earlier research
My past work has been a mosaic shaped by a number of different interests. One of my enduring interests over the last years has focused on Islamic theological ethics, particularly ethical theories incorporating a prominent appeal to reason. This was the subject of my first book, Moral Agents and their Deserts: The Character of Mu'tazilite Ethics (generously granted the Albert Hourani Book Award in 2009), which explored the ethics of Mu'tazilite theologians and more specifically their conception of moral desert. Its sequel was a project investigating the ethical thought of the controversial (and in some respects surprisingly understudied) Hanbalite thinker Ibn Taymiyya, which recently appeared as Ibn Taymiyya's Theological Ethics. My aim in this book is to shed light on Ibn Taymiyya's understanding of the nature of ethical norms and ethical knowledge, and on the status of reason and the linchpin concept of human nature (fiṭra) in his ethical scheme.
Another set of interests has taken me outside Islamic studies and spanned a number of more properly philosophical themes. The philosophical theme that has formed my centre of gravity over the last few years has been the notion of wonder in its multiple dimensions—philosophical, ethical, aesthetic. Wonder is the topic of a collective volume I edited under the title Practices of Wonder: Cross-Disciplinary Perspectives. It is a key theme in my engagement of Schopenhauer, which appeared as Schopenhauer and the Aesthetic Standpoint: Philosophy as a Practice of the Sublime, and offers a new route into Schopenhauer’s philosophy by approaching it through the prism of the experience of the sublime. It is also the subject of my recent book, Wonder: A Grammar, which draws together some of my main reflections on the topic (reflections that I hope will not be my last).
Other themes have included the notions of personal identity, character and virtue. What runs through this seemingly disparate work (see Books) is a preoccupation with the boundary between the practical and the philosophical, and a concern—sometimes more and sometimes less successfully carried out, I would be the first to own—with engaging problems of experience in philosophical form.
Another set of interests has taken me outside Islamic studies and spanned a number of more properly philosophical themes. The philosophical theme that has formed my centre of gravity over the last few years has been the notion of wonder in its multiple dimensions—philosophical, ethical, aesthetic. Wonder is the topic of a collective volume I edited under the title Practices of Wonder: Cross-Disciplinary Perspectives. It is a key theme in my engagement of Schopenhauer, which appeared as Schopenhauer and the Aesthetic Standpoint: Philosophy as a Practice of the Sublime, and offers a new route into Schopenhauer’s philosophy by approaching it through the prism of the experience of the sublime. It is also the subject of my recent book, Wonder: A Grammar, which draws together some of my main reflections on the topic (reflections that I hope will not be my last).
Other themes have included the notions of personal identity, character and virtue. What runs through this seemingly disparate work (see Books) is a preoccupation with the boundary between the practical and the philosophical, and a concern—sometimes more and sometimes less successfully carried out, I would be the first to own—with engaging problems of experience in philosophical form.
Translations
Alongside my other activities, I'm currently at work on two translation projects. One is a translation of the literary-cum-philosophical work al-Hawāmil wa’l-shawāmil, jointly written (in some sense of "jointly") by the 10th/11th-century thinkers Abū Ḥayyān al-Tawḥīdī and Miskawayh. This project forms part of the ambitious series of translations spearheaded by the Library of Arabic Literature. The other is a translation of a warm-hearted little novel by the Kuwaiti writer Ismail Fahd Ismail, The Old Woman and the River. For more details on this book and some of my other work as a moonlighting translator of modern Arabic fiction see Translations.
