Eirik Hovden is, as of spring 2025, an associate professor in Arabic and Middle Eastern History at the University of Bergen, Norway. From 2020–2025, he led the starting grant project “Canonization and Codification of Islamic Legal Texts,” funded by the Trond Mohn Research Foundation in Bergen. Previously, he worked as a researcher on the Humanities in the European Research Area (HERA) project “Uses of the past” in Islamic law, led by Robert Gleave. Hovden’s first postdoctoral work in Vienna (Institute for Social Anthropology, Austrian Academy of Sciences) focused on the politics of the doctrinal landscape of medieval highland Yemen. His PhD and monograph (Brill 2019, translated into Arabic in 2024) examine the historical development of Zaydī waqf law in Yemen.