Dr Said Aljoumani

Projects

Cluster of Excellence ‘Understanding Written Artefacts’ (2019–2025)

• 2023–2025: Project Lead RFE14:
  Reading the Scholarly Archive in the Pre-Ottoman Arabic Middle East

Affiliated Projects

• 2022–2024: Principal Investigator of the project:
  The al-Jazzar Library Project

Research Interests 

Said Aljoumani works at the intersections of history and material philology, with written artefacts at the centre of his research. His publications draw extensively on documents and codices to explore the written culture of Arabic-speaking Greater Syria between c. 1000 and the present. He has extensively published on the history of libraries, documentary sources and scribal practices, including peer-reviewed articles in journals such as Journal of Islamic Manuscripts (Brill), Journal of the Institute of Arabic Manuscripts (Cairo), Der Islam (De Gruyter) and Al-Khizanah (Iraq) as well as monographs with publishers such as Edinburgh University Press, Brill, De Gruyter and the German Orient Institute Beirut. His monograph The Library of a Madrasa in Aleppo received the Book Award of the US-based Middle East Librarians Association.

CV

Said studied Library Science at Damascus University (1999–2003) and Cairo University (2004–2007). He obtained his PhD in Library Studies, specialising in Arabic manuscripts and cataloguing, from Cairo University in 2010. After the turbulences of the Syrian War, he was awarded an IIE Scholar Rescue Fund scholarship at the University of Jordan (2016/17) and subsequently Freie Universität Berlin (2017/18). He then obtained an Alexander von Humboldt scholarship (Philipp Schwartz Initiative) at Freie Universität (2018–20), followed by a research grant as Einstein Guest Researcher (Wissenschaftsfreiheit) (2020–22). He joined the CSMC in 2022 and has since been involved in numerous research and teaching initiatives, especially in Arabic.