Maria Isabel Fierro Bello

Maria Isabel Fierro Bello is a Research Professor at the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC) within the Institute of Languages and Cultures of the Mediterranean and the Near East. Her work focuses on the political, religious, and intellectual history of al-Andalus and the Islamic West, Islamic law, orthodoxy formation, and violence in medieval Arabic sources.

• Ph.D. in Semitic Philology - Universidad Complutense Madrid

Her research spans themes like heterodoxy in the Islamic West, legal traditions, and cross-cultural interactions. Current projects include Mediating Islam in the Digital Age and Knowledge, Heresy, and Political Culture of the Islamic West (KOHEPOCU), the latter funded by an ERC Advanced Grant.

Notable awards include the Anneliese Maier Award (2014) from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation and the R. Stephen Humphreys Distinguished Scholar title (2014) at UC Santa Barbara. She has taught at Stanford, Chicago, Freie Universität Berlin, and Universidad Autónoma Madrid, and was a visiting scholar at Harvard Law School and the Institute for Advanced Study Princeton.