Petra Sijpesteijn Elected Member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences

13 May 2026

Photo: M. Reichmann

The Professor of Arabic language and culture at Leiden University receives one of the highest honours in the Dutch academic system. Sijpesteijn has been a member of the CSMC Advisory Board since 2021.

Petra Sijpesteijn’s research focuses on the social and political history of the early Islamic world, drawing on a vast corpus of often neglected documentary papyri and other manuscripts to recover the experiences of Muslims and non-Muslims living under Islamic rule. Examining the transition from the late antique Byzantine and Egyptian systems to an Arab–Muslim state, she explores how new Islamic institutions built on, transformed, and sometimes disrupted earlier structures. Her work increasingly extends beyond Egypt to regions such as the Iberian Peninsula and Central Asia and situates the early Islamic empire within global networks that connected the Mediterranean to Southeast Asia.

Sijpesteijn studied history and Arabic at Leiden University before continuing her training in Damascus, Cambridge, Cornell and Princeton, receiving her PhD in Near Eastern Studies in 2004. She has held positions at Christ Church, Oxford, and the CNRS in Paris, and has led major international initiatives such as the International Society for Arabic Papyrology and digitisation and cataloguing projects at the Austrian National Library. Her work has been supported by prestigious European Research Council grants, including the projects ‘The Formation of Islam. The view from below’ and ‘Embedding Conquest: Naturalising Muslim Rule in the Early Islamic Empire (600–1000)’.

Founded in 1808, the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW) serves as a forum and voice of the arts and sciences in the Netherlands. It represents the full spectrum of disciplines through a select membership chosen on the basis of academic excellence. The KNAW advises the Dutch government on matters of scientific and scholarly importance and oversees a group of leading national research institutes. Election to the Academy is one of the highest honours in the Dutch academic system and recognises sustained, field‑shaping contributions.

Sijpesteijn has been a member of the CSMC Advisory Board since 2021. The board brings together international experts from a wide range of disciplines, including Indology, African Studies, classical philology, art history, archaeology, epigraphy, and Islamic and Arabic studies. Its members offer external scholarly perspectives and help the CSMC refine its long-term research agenda and foster international collaborations.