It’s a pleasure to introduce our guest blog editor for November: David Vishanoff, Associate Professor of Islamic studies in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Oklahoma. Throughout the month of November, Professor Vishanoff will share a series of posts on a variety of topics related to research, teaching, and the state of the field.
Professor Vishanoff received his Ph.D. in West and South Asian Religions from Emory University in 2004. His first two books, The Formation of Islamic Hermeneutics and A Critical Introduction to Islamic Legal Theory, dealt with medieval theories of Qur’anic interpretation; he has been extending that project into the modern period, beginning in Indonesia where he spent the spring of 2013 as a Fulbright scholar.
His other long–term projects are an epistemology and pedagogy of “sacrificial listening” and a series of studies on Muslim uses of the Bible, for which he is reconstructing and translating an eighth–century Muslim rewriting of the “Psalms of David.” These projects have led him to dabble in digital methods of data visualization and distant reading.
For more on Professor Vishanoff’s projects, visit his personal website.