Dr. Tommaso Tesei


Areas of specialization:

Early Islamic Studies, Qur’anic Studies


Areas of competence:

Religious Studies, Arabic Studies, Late Antiquity


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Tommaso Tesei completed his Ph.D. in 2013 jointly at the Department of Oriental Studies, University of Rome (La Sapienza) and at the department of Arabic Studies of the Institut national des langues et civilisations orientales (INALCO), Paris. His doctoral dissertation (Deux légendes d’Alexandre le Grand dans le Coran. Une étude sur les origines du texte sacré arabe et sur ses liens avec les littératures chrétiennes et juives de l’Antiquité Tardive) deals with the relationship between two Qurʾānic pericopes and various contemporaneous late antique traditions concerning Alexander the Great, found in Syriac apocalyptic texts. In 2012, he served as a visiting researcher at the Department of Theology, University of Utrecht, where he participated in the research project The Here and the Hereafter in Islamic Traditions, directed by Prof. Christian Lange. In 2013, he was awarded a Mellon doctoral fellowship to join the research project The Qurʾān Seminar, directed by Prof. Gabriel Said Reynolds at Notre Dame University. From September 2013, he has co-directed the Early Islamic Studies Seminar: International Scholarship on the Qur’ān and Islamic Origins. Dr. Tesei is currently a Polonsky research fellow at the Van Leer Jerusalem Institute, investigating the case of Qurʾānic eschatology and early Islamic apocalypticism within the broader context of Late Antiquity.