Philip Bockholt

Dr. Philip Bockholt is an Assistant Professor (Juniorprofessor) in the History of the Turko-Persian World at the University of Münster's Institute for Arabic and Islamic Studies (since 2022). He leads the DFG-funded Emmy Noether Junior Research Group TRANSLAPT, focusing on intra-Islamic knowledge transfer through Arabic-Persian-Ottoman translations (1400–1750). Previously, he held a research position at Leipzig University (2018–2022) and completed his PhD at the Freie Universität Berlin in 2018.

His research centers on pre-modern Islamic historiography, manuscript studies, and transregional translation processes in the Eastern Mediterranean. Notable works include World Historiography between Shia and Sunna (2021) and Ein Bestseller der islamischen Vormoderne (2022). He has conducted archival research in 15 countries, including Istanbul, Jerusalem, and Saint Petersburg.

Bockholt has secured major grants including DFG funding for German-Japanese textual transmission conferences and a Fritz Thyssen Foundation grant for Texts as Living Objects. He supervises doctoral projects on topics ranging from Ottoman-Turkish Quranic exegesis translations to Safavid Iran's manuscript culture.

His awards include the 2020 Classical Islamic World Book Prize and the 2019 Annemarie-Schimmel Research Prize. Current projects include editing volumes on Ottoman Persian translations and hosting international conferences on textual transmission and multilingualism in early modern Eurasia.