Maria Isabel Fierro Bello

Maribel Fierro received her Ph.D. in Semitic Philology at the University Complutense Madrid. She is a research professor at the Institute of Languages and Cultures of the Mediterranean and the Near East of the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC). She has worked and published on the political, religious and intellectual history of al-Andalus and the Islamic West, Islamic law, the construction of orthodoxy and the persecution of heresies, and violence and its representation in Medieval Arabic sources.

Her current research projects are: Practicing Knowledge in Islamic Societies and their Neighbors (Anneliese Maier Award 2014, Alexander von Humboldt Foundation); Local Contexts and Global Dynamics: al-Andalus and the Maghreb in the Islamic East (with Mayte Penelas, financed by the Spanish MINECO) and Mediating Islam in the Digital Age (MIDA).

In addition, she has taught at the Universities of Stanford (2002), Chicago (2011), Freie Universität Berlin (MA Intellectual Encounters of the Islamicate World) and Universidad Autónoma Madrid, and has been Directeur dʼétudes at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (1998, 2012). She was a visiting scholar at Harvard Law School (2017), Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton (2015, 1994-5) and Institute for Advanced Studies of The Hebrew University of Jerusalem (1999-2000). She has been R. Stephen Humphreys Distinguished Scholar, University of California, Santa Barbara (2014).