Speaker Biographies

Name: Alexey Arapov

The Sacred «Book» of the Cosmos as a Subject of Timurid Empire and Renaissance

Biography:
Alexey Arapov graduated from the Faculty of Physics at Tashkent State University in 1982. In 1991, he received a PhD in pedagogical sciences. From 1994 to 2005, he served as director of the Computer-Asia Science and Technology Park. His academic career includes work at the Institute of Art History (Tashkent, 2004) and the Institute of Central Asian Studies (Samarkand, 2009–2015). In 2008 and 2010, he completed internships at the German Archaeological Institute in Berlin. Since 2005, he has been the founder and director of the private scientific publishing house SMI-ASIA (Tashkent).

Name: Jean Arzoumanov

The Indian science of auspicious hours in Persianate astrology

Biography:
Jean Arzoumanov is a postdoctoral scholar at the MPIWG where his research focuses on the adaptation and translation of Indic astral sciences into Persian in early modern North India. As a historian of early modern and modern Persianate intellectual history in South Asia, he studies the textual encounters between Islamicate and Indic cultures. He earned his PhD in 2021 from the Université Sorbonne Nouvelle–Paris 3. Between 2023–2025, Jean Arzoumanov was Rocher Foundation postdoctoral fellow at the University of Chicago. His current monograph project focuses on the involvement of non-Muslim literati in Persian literary production, with particular attention to the emergence of Hindu devotional literature in Persian. In parallel, he is completing for Primus Books a partial translation of the Tashrīh al-aqvām, a Persian ethnographic compendium composed in 1825 in North India. He has also published several papers on the representation and translation of the Jain tradition.

Name: Hoda Ata

The concept of time in ancient nations

Biography:
Hoda Ata is a Ph.D. candidate in the History of Science at the University of Barcelona, supervised by Professor Miquel Forcada. Her thesis investigates the historical and cultural dimensions of time in ancient Persia. Her work analyzes how Persian societies perceived, measured, and systematized time, with particular attention to celestial observation and its scientific implications. By exploring the intersection of astronomy, culture, and scientific thought, Ata’s research aims to enrich our understanding of ancient chronometry and contribute to broader comparative studies on the conceptualization of time across civilizations.

Name: Khasawneh Awni

From Babylon to al-Andalus: The Transmission of Astral Sciences between Civilizations and Their Impact on Islamic and Latin Thought in the Middle Ages

Biography:
Dr. Awni M. Khasawneh is a Jordanian astrophysicist and geospatial sciences expert, currently serving as a Professor at the University of Jordan. He holds a Ph.D. in Astrophysics and Radio Astronomy from the Armenian National Academy of Sciences. He previously served as an academic staff member at the University of Sharjah in the UAE and held several leadership positions, including Director General of the Royal Jordanian Geographic Centre and Dean of the College of Surveying Sciences. He is Secretary General of the Arab Union for Astronomy and Space Sciences and Chairman of the Jordanian Astronomical Society.

Dr. Khasawneh has played a leading role in advancing astronomy, GIS, and space education in the Arab region, and is affiliated with multiple UN and international scientific committees. He has supervised over 30 master’s theses and authored numerous publications in astrophysics, remote sensing, and Islamic astronomy. His research interests include star formation, astronomical heritage, GNSS, and space applications for sustainable development.

Name: Alberto Bardi

Reciprocity without Consensus: Astronomy and the Question of Autonomy in Constantinople–Istanbul

Biography:
Alberto Bardi is an Assistant Professor of History of Science and Technology in the Department of Philosophy and Educational Sciences at the University of Turin. Previously, he served as an Associate Professor in the Department of the History of Science at Tsinghua University, where he taught courses in the history of science, environmental studies, the history of artificial intelligence, and Ancient Greek. He has also taught at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem and was a fellow at Harvard University’s Dumbarton Oaks, the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin, and the Polonsky Academy for Advanced Study in the Humanities and Social Sciences. Currently, he is the Principal Investigator of the research project “Cross-Cultural Scientific Exchanges between Christians, Muslims, and Jews in Byzantine Astronomy (5th to 16th Centuries),” funded by the Rita Levi Montalcini Research Fund (Call 2021) of the Italian Ministry of University and Research.

Name: Rana Brentjes

Creating an Image Database of al-Sufi’s Book of the Images of the Fixed Stars and Exploring Cross-Cultural Influences

Biography:
Rana Brentjes is an art and cultural historian specializing in analogue and digital curation. Until 2024, she served as the Digital Content Curator for the MPIWG project Visualization and Material Cultures of the Heavens, where she developed and curated the VoH Database. Together with Sonja Brentjes, she co-edited the Routledge Handbook on the Sciences in Islamicate Societies (Routledge, 2023) and Imagining the Heavens (Mimesis, 2024) and is collaborating with her to create the definitive digital resource on al-Sufi’s Book of the Fixed Stars. She is also planning a virtual exhibition on celestial material cultures and further interdisciplinary digital outreach publications.

Name: Hamid Bohloul

Creating an Image Database of al-Sufi’s Book of the Images of the Fixed Stars and Exploring Cross-Cultural Influences

Biography:
Hamid Bohloul is a historian of Islamicate sciences and is currently a postdoctoral fellow with the ASTRA research group at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin. His research focuses on the intersection of mathematical astronomy and astrology. In his current project, he devotes particular attention to the works of astrologers who served in Timurid courts in the fifteenth century.

Name: James Brannon

Concerning the Origin of the Middle-Eastern Terms “Chaldean” and “Egyptian” in Greco-Roman Planetary Orders

Biography:
Dr. James Brannon is an independent scholar in the history of ancient and medieval astronomy, who lives and works in Pennsylvania, USA. Following his earning MA degrees at Stanford (humanities) and Wisconsin-Madison (history of science), he has pursued scholarship (publications, conference presentations, reviews) in the history of planetary order, medieval and Renaissance history of Sacrobosco’s De Sphaera genre, and the ancient chronicle of circumsolar Mercury and Venus. In an earlier career, James was a research scientist at IBM, where he investigated laser processing of surfaces. For this technical profession, in which he has widely published and been granted many patents, he earned graduate degrees at UC San Diego.

Name: Godefroid de Callataÿ

Making Worlds in Islam: the Horoscope of Baghdad in Context

Biography:
Godefroid de Callataÿ is Professor of Arabic and Islamic Studies at the Oriental Institute of the University of Louvain (UCLouvain). He has specialized in the history of science and philosophy of the Islamicate world, with particular interest in medieval Arabic encyclopedism, Ismailism, and the corpus known as Rasā’il Ikhwān al-Ṣafā’ (‘Epistles of the Brethren of Purity’). Before MOSAIC, he has led two major research projects: ARC “Speculum Arabicum” (Objectifying the contribution of the Arab-Muslim world to the history of sciences and ideas: the sources and resources of medieval encyclopaedism), UCLouvain, 2012-2017); ERC Advanced “PhilAnd” (The origin and early development of philosophy in tenth-century al-Andalus: the impact of ill-defined materials and channels of transmission), UCLouvain / Warburg Institute (2017-2024). As part of MOSAIC project (for which he serves as corresponding PI), he will be mainly concerned with conjunctional astrology, the classifications of science, and the impact of the Brethren of Purity over the ages.

Name: Nick Campion

Conference Introduction: At the Crossroads

Biography:
Nicholas Campion is Associate Professor in Cosmology and Culture, Principal Lecturer in the Institute of Education and Humanities, and Director of the Sophia Centre for the Study of Cosmology in Culture at the University of Wales Trinity Saint David. He is Programme Director of the online MA programmes in Cultural Astronomy and Astrology, the only academic course in the world to consider humanity’s relationship with the sky, and the MA in Ecology and Spirituality. His books include the two-volume History of Western Astrology (London: Bloomsbury 2008/9) and Astrology and Cosmology in the World’s Religions (New York: New York University Press, 2012). He is the editorial director of the Sophia Centre Press and editor of Culture and Cosmos, the journal on the history of cultural astronomy and astrology. In 2022 the European Society for Astronomy in Culture (SEAC) awarded him the Carlos Jaschek award in honour of his significant contribution to the study of astronomy and culture.

Name: Gaye Danışan

Between Tables, Maps, and Diagrams: An Ottoman Manuscript of Time, the Heavens, and the World

Biography:
Gaye Danışan is a faculty member in the Department of the History of Science at Istanbul University. Her research focuses on Ottoman astronomy, especially calendars, portable astronomical instruments, volvelles, nautical astronomy, and astrometeorology. She earned her BA (2005) and MA (2009) in Astronomy and Space Sciences at Istanbul University and completed her PhD in the History of Science there in 2016 on sixteenth-century Ottoman nautical astronomy and instruments. She was a TÜBİTAK-2219 postdoctoral researcher at the History of Science Museum, University of Oxford (2017–2018), conducting comparative research on Ottoman portable instruments. She has led several funded research projects, including Paper Instruments in the History of Ottoman Astronomy, founded by the Scientific Instrument Society (2017–2020), a TÜBİTAK-1003 project on annual and perpetual calendars (1550–1710), and a TÜBA-GEBİP project on the adaptation and diffusion of portable astronomical instruments in Ottoman geography (1500–1700).

Name: Karine Dilanian

From the prophetic Arab-Persian cosmic cycles to Johannes Kepler's ‘Harmony of the World’

Biography:
Karine Dilanian holds an MA in Cultural Astronomy and Astrology from the University of Wales Trinity Saint David, UK with a dissertation An examination of theories of light in relation to the practice of astrology. She is a co-founder of the Institute for the Study of Cosmology and Astronomy in History, Philosophy, and Culture in Moscow, Russia. Karine is the originator and publisher of The Kepler Project — a publication of the astrological handwritten manuscripts of Johannes Kepler. She organized (in cooperation with the Sophia Centre) international conferences titled “The Harmony of the World” to celebrate the 400th anniversary of the publication of Johannes Kepler's *Harmonices Mundi* in St. Petersburg in 2019 and “On the Historical Skies” in Samarkand in 2022. Karine is a PhD candidate with research on “Kepler’s Cosmology: Light Metaphysics, Theology, and Psychology.”

Name: Naser Dumairieh

Biography:
Naser Dumairieh is an Assistant Professor of Islamic Studies at Ibn Haldun University, Istanbul. He obtained his PhD in Islamic Studies from McGill University. His areas of research include Islamic philosophy, theology, Sufism, Arabic Manuscripts, and knowledge transmission, with a particular focus on the intellectual and spiritual life of the Ḥijāz. His publications include Intellectual Life in the Ḥijāz before Wahhabism: Ibrāhīm al-Kūrānī’s (d. 1101/1690), Theology of Sufism (Brill, 2021) and Sufis and Their Lodges in the Ottoman Ḥijāz (Brill, 2023).

Name: Arezoo Egherlou

Why the Moon and Sun Appear Larger on the Horizon? An Argument Based on Optics in the Commentary on the Tadhkirah by Fatḥ Allāh Shirwānī

Biography:
Arezoo Egherlou is a researcher in the history of science and a graduate of the Research Institute for the History of Science at the University of Tehran. Her research focuses on the history of optics and astronomy in the Islamic world, with particular attention to the introduction of optical science into astronomy (hayʾa) and the clarification of the relationship between these two disciplines in the Islamic period. Her master’s thesis examined the science of optics in Fatḥ Allāh Shirwānī’s Sharḥ al-Tadhkirah al-Naṣayrīyah, through critical analysis of manuscript sources and the transmission and transformation of Ibn al-Haytham’s optical theories in later astronomical texts.

She is currently active as a researcher in the history of science and serves as the Managing Editor of the journal Scientific Heritage of Islam and Iran. Her research interests include the development of optical theory within hayʾa literature, the interaction between optics and astronomy from the fifth to the ninth centuries AH, Islamic scientific commentaries, and interdisciplinary approaches to celestial phenomena and visual perception in premodern scientific traditions.

Name: Meltem Ersoy

Perspectives on Sufi Cosmology in the Rasāʾil of the Ikhwan al-Safa

Biography:
Meltem Ersoy is a graduate of the MA in Cultural Astrology and Astronomy at the University of Wales Trinity Saint David, where she focused on archetypes, religion, and astrology—an education that ultimately led her to train as a Jungian Psychoanalyst in Canada. Born and raised in Türkiye, she holds a BA in Political Science from Boğaziçi University. She was awarded a Diploma in Analytical Psychology from the Ontario Association of Jungian Analysts for her thesis on cultural complexes, alchemy and the presence of the cosmos in the psyche, examined through the Moon’s archetypal imagery in dreams in clinical practice. Meltem works in private practice, offering online and in-person sessions as a Registered Psychotherapist (Q), Jungian Psychoanalyst, and Astrologer. Her life and education across Turkish and English speaking cultures in three countries inform her clinical perspective and support her work as a cross-cultural bridge.

Name: Dallin Evans

Astronomers and Astrologers in the Caliph’s Court: Mathematical developments in tenth-century al-Andalus

Biography:
Dallin Evans is a PhD candidate at Rice University specializing in Caliphal architecture in tenth-century Islamic Spain. Trained as a practicing architect, he uses his expertise to analyze his areas of research. While earning his master’s in architecture, he studied Renaissance and Classical art and architecture at Syracuse University’s Florence campus, where he also curated several exhibitions. More recently, he has collaborated with Glair Anderson in the DLIVCC by creating digital models of archaeological findings at al-Rummaniyya, a villa near Cordoba Spain. Additionally, he has created drawings in publications for his advisors Farshid Emami and Sophie Crawford-Brown. As the 2024-25 Camfield Fellow at the Museum of Fine Art Houston, he created digital animations to accompany objects in the museum’s Islamic galleries. His forthcoming article on the poetic waterscapes of Munya al-Nāʾūra is under review with MDPI for the special issue, Al-Bustān: Recreational Es tates in the Islamic West and Sicily. He is currently co-organizing a graduate conference on materiality at Rice, and a yearlong series of programs for “Archeology Now” on al-Andalus. He has presented his work at conferences across North America and Europe, supported by departmental and external awards.

Name: Martin Gansten

Byzantine Astrological Doctrines in India? On the Identity of ‘Romaka’ in Tājika Texts

Biography:
Martin Gansten (Lund University, Sweden) is a Sanskritist and historian of religion specializing in Indic religions as well as the global transmission history of horoscopic astrology. His research interests include astral knowledge systems in cultural and historical contexts ranging from Hellenistic Egypt to nineteenth-century Britain, with particular emphasis on South Asia and the medieval Indian reception of Perso-Arabic astrology.

Name: Dorian Greenbaum

Edessa and Astrology: The Approaches of Bardaișan and Theophilus

Biography:
Dorian Gieseler Greenbaum writes on the history of astrology, astrology and medicine, and astrology and divination. She teaches post-graduates at the University of Wales Trinity Saint David. Books include Late Classical Astrology: Paulus Alexandrinus and Olympiodorus (translator and annotator),2001; The Daimon in Hellenistic Astrology: Origins and Influence, 2016; (with Bruce Graver) Peggy Webling and the Story behind Frankenstein: The Making of a Hollywood Monster, 2024. Editor: ‘Kepler’s Astrology’, Culture and Cosmos 14.1-2, 2010. Co-editor (with Charles Burnett) From Masha’allah to Kepler: The Theory and Practice of Astrology in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, 2015; (with Nicholas Campion) Astrology in Time and Place, 2015; (with Josefina Rodríguez-Arribas) Unveiling the Hidden – Anticipating the Future: Divinatory Practices Among Jews Between Qumran and the Modern Period, 2021. Her most recent article is 'The Origins of Questions in Astrology', published November 2025, in Astrologers at Work: Essays on the Practices and Techniques of Astrology in Memory of Helena Avelar (eds L. Ribeiro and C. Burnett).

Name: Orhan Güneş

Calculation in Mesopotamian Astronomy: Analysis of System B for Jupiter

Biography:
Orhan Güneş is an Associate Professor in the Department of Philosophy at Istanbul Medeniyet University. He received his B.A., M.A, and Ph. D. degrees from the Department of Astronomy and Space Sciences at Istanbul University. He then completed additional M.A. and Ph. D. degrees in the History of Science at Istanbul Medeniyet University. His research interests include Mesopotamian Astronomy, post-16th-century Ottoman Astronomy, and the evolution of Open Star Clusters. Currently, he is co-editor of the Encyclopedia of Science and Technology in Contemporary Islamic Societies, which is being prepared as part of a project conducted by ISAM (Centre for Islamic Studies).

Name: Fakhriddin Ibragimov

The Comparative Analysis and Astronomical Foundations of Calendars in Abū Rayḥān al-Bīrūnī’s The Chronology of Ancient Nations (al-Āthār al-Bāqiyah)

Biography:
Fakhriddin Ibragimov is a Doctor of History (PhD) and a Researcher at al- Biruni Institute of Oriental Studies in Tashkent. His primary academic interests include the History of Islamic Science, the History of Astronomy and Astrology, Central Asian Cultural History, and Comparative Calendar Systems. He focuses particularly on the encyclopedic heritage of polymaths such as Abū Rayḥān al-Bīrūnī and Avicenna. Fakhriddin has authored over 20 scholarly articles and book chapters on the intersection of astronomical practices and religious law in the medieval Islamic world, demonstrating a strong emphasis on cross-cultural comparison and the transmission of knowledge from East to West.

Name: Stoyanka Kenderova

Astronomical Works preserved in the Waqf Libraries in Вulgaria during the Ottoman Period

Biography:
Stoyanka Kenderova received her degree in Turkish Philology from St. Kliment Ohridski University of Sofia, with French as a second language. After completing an intensive course in literary Arabic at the Bourguiba School in Tunisia, she pursued extramural postgraduate studies at the Institute of Oriental Studies, Saint Petersburg, where she earned her doctoral degree with a thesis titled, “al-Idrisi’s Data on the Balkans and Their Sources.” She subsequently obtained a second doctoral degree from the University of Strasbourg with the thesis, “Bibliothèques et livres musulmans dans les territoires balkaniques de l’Empire Ottoman: le cas de Samokov XVIIIe – première moitié du XIXe siècle.” She was appointed Professor in 2004.

Kenderova has served as an archivist at the Oriental Department of the Bulgarian National Library, advancing to Senior Research Associate and later to Archivist in Chief. She has also held visiting lecturer positions in Ottoman Turkish and Arabic paleography at the University of Strasbourg (1995-1997) and in Ottoman Turkish Diplomatics at St. Kliment Ohridski University of Sofia (from 2000). Her research and publications focus on catalogues of manuscripts and archival documents preserved in the National Library of Bulgaria, codicology of Oriental books, Ottoman Turkish diplomatics, the history of medicine and hospitals in the Ottoman Empire, and the history of geography.

Name: R. Hakan Kırkoğlu

Astrology as an institutionalized science at the Ottoman Court: Musazâde Mehmed Ubeydullah Efendi and the Horoscope of an Ottoman Prince

Biography:
R. Hakan Kırkoğlu holds MA degrees in History (2016) and Economics (1991) from Boğaziçi University in Istanbul. His recent MA thesis titled Ilm-i Nücum and Its Role in the Ottoman Court during the Eighteenth Century at the Boğaziçi University has also been published as a book. (2017) He graduated from Management Engineering Department in Istanbul Technical University (1988) As an astrologer and researcher, he has been interested in the history of astrology and science. His article Ilm-i Nudjum and Eighteenth-Century Ottoman Court Politics has been published in the the Journal of Culture and Cosmos, Vol.18, No:2 by Sophia Center Press.

Name: Ulla Koch

TBA

Biography:
Ulla Koch (Ph.D.). Assyriologist affiliated with the Dept. of Cross-Cultural and Regional Studies at the University of Copenhagen. Her main fields of research are Mesopotamian divination, religion and literature. She has published and translated numerous primary cuneiform sources into English and Danish, including divinatory texts, the Epic of Gilgamesh and the Babylonian epic of creation, Enuma Elish. She has written monographs and articles primarily on Mesopotamian divination and literature and has recently published a monograph on the 1st millennium Mesopotamian divinatory genres (Mesopotamian Divination Texts – Conversing with the Gods. 2015) Since 2004 she has worked with IT in the defense and health sectors thus demonstrating the never ceasing relevance of cuneiform studies.

Name: Jeffrey Kotyk

Are the Planets All Evil? Religious Perspectives in Late Antiquity

Biography:
Jeffrey Kotyk is a Research Scholar at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin, where he is working on a research project that deals with the transcultural history of astronomy and cosmology in premodern Asia. He has published a number of studies on the eastward spread of astral sciences  and the religious, cultural, and artistic developments that followed.

Name: Hee Sook Lee-Niinioja

Star and Constellation Myths as Symbolic Stories in Celestial Patterns in Medieval Sacred Spaces: Church/Mosque/Temple

Biography:
Dr Hee Sook Lee-Niinioja is a scholar/journalist/artist/designer. As an international pioneer student in Scandinavia (1970s), she received education in journalism (BA/South Korea), art-design (BA & MA/Norway), visual communication (MA/USA), architecture (PhD/UK), theology, literature, etc. She has exhibited “Goethe in Me” and presented academic research. She has published journalistic articles and books on her specialisations in Hindu-Buddhist/Christian/Islamic architecture, cultural heritage and semiotic text-image emotions, hoping to enhance the dialogue between different religions through commonness. She volunteers for humanitarian work while teaching in institutions worldwide. She received awards and appreciation, including the Order of Civil Merit Medal from the President of South Korea

Name: Matteo Martelli

Apollonius of Tyana’s Hermetic Astral Doctrine in the Syriac Tradition

Biography:
Matteo Martelli is Professor of the History of Science at the University of Bologna, where he teaches the history of ancient science and technology as well as the history of ancient medicine. His research focuses on Graeco-Roman and Byzantine science—particularly alchemy and medicine (pharmacology)—and its reception within the Syro-Arabic tradition. After working on projects on Greek and Byzantine medicine in Berlin, he served as principal investigator of the ERC project AlchemEast – Alchemy in the Making: From Ancient Babylonia via Graeco-Roman Egypt into the Byzantine, Syriac, and Arabic Traditions. He is currently one of the four PIs of the ERC Synergy project MOSAIC, in which he concentrates on the occult sciences in Byzantine and Syriac traditions.

Name: Dragana Van de moortel-Ilić

The Narthex of the Lesnovo Monastery: Rulership, Dress, and Celestial Imagery

Biography:
Dragana Van de moortel – Ilić holds an MA in Cultural Astronomy and Astrology from the University of Wales Trinity Saint David, where her research explored cosmological elements in fourteenth-century ecclesiastical mural paintings of medieval Serbia. She is currently pursuing an MLitt in History at the University of Oxford, focusing on cosmological motifs in the Narthex of the Lesnovo Monastery and exploring how concepts of rulership and power are expressed through iconography within the framework of Christian Orthodox theological thought. Dragana’s wider academic interest lies in medieval Christian symbolism of the heavens and in how contemporary audiences perceive and interpret this symbolic tradition.

Name: Robert Morrison

Averroës, Astronomy and Astrology in Istanbul and Italy

Biography:
Robert Morrison is George Lincoln Skolfield, Jr. Professor of Religion and Middle Eastern and North African Studies at Bowdoin College. His most recent book is Merchants of Knowledge: Intellectual Exchange in the Ottoman Empire and Renaissance Europe (Stanford University Press, 2025).

Name: Sediqeh Pourmokhtar

Relationship between astronomy and motifs in Ilkhanid tiles (14th century), drawing on the era's scientific advancements and artistic expressions.

Biography:
Assistant professor, in Islamic Art, Shahed University Tehran Iran.

Name: Luís Campos Ribeiro
Луис Кампос Рибейро

Comparing astrological practices: between Persia and Europe
Сравнение астрологических практик: между Персией и Европой

Biography:
Luís Campos Ribeiro is an historian of science and art and a researcher at CIUHCT, University of Lisbon, heads the international Astra Project: Historical research on astrological techniques and practices hosted at the University of Lisbon. He has a PhD on the History and Philosophy of Sciences by the University of Lisbon published by Brill with the title Jesuit Astrology: Prognostication and Science in Early Modern Culture (2023). His research focuses the history of astrology, astronomy and medicine (Medieval and Early Modern) as well as scientific illustration.

Луис Кампос Рибейро — историк науки и искусства, научный сотрудник CIUHCT Лиссабонского университета, возглавляет международный проект Astra: Исторические исследования астрологических техник и практик, проводимые в Лиссабонском университете. Он имеет докторскую степень по истории и философии наук, полученную в Лиссабонском университете и опубликованную издательством Brill под названием «Иезуитская астрология: предсказание и наука в культуре раннего Нового времени» (2023). Его исследования сосредоточены на истории астрологии, астрономии и медицины (средневековье и раннее Новое время), а также на научной иллюстрации.

Name: Petra G. Schmidl

Prognostic Handbooks

Biography:
Petra G. Schmidl is a historian of science whose research focuses on pre-modern astronomy, astrology, and prognostication in Islamicate societies. Her scholarship investigates the procedures, methodological frameworks, and instruments underpinning astronomical, astrological, and prognostic practices that help people in orienting themselves in everyday life. A significant componentof her work centres on Rasūlid Yemen (13th–15th century) and the scholarly engagements of its sultans, a focus that is further developed in her project “The Sultan and the Stars” (tabsira.hypotheses.org/). Recently she started together with three co-PIs the project MOSAIC supported by the European Research Counsil, that aims at “Mapping Occult Sciences Across Islamicate Cultures.”

Name: Zachary Schwarze

Set Sun, Shudder Sky: Astral Dogmatics in Early Byzantine Laments

Biography:
Zachary Schwarze is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Religion at Rice University in Houston, United States. He works at the intersection of affect and ethics, the history of Christian thought, and the history of art, with a thematic orientation toward death and dying. He is currently preparing a dissertation that examines the use of human remains in the production of art, whereby makers leverage Christian theological idiom of to open spaces of grief and mourning for victims of systemic violence and mass death.

Name: Ozan Sanlı Şentürk

Biography:
Prof. Dr. Ozan Sanlı Şentürk has pursued the Sufi path within the Halveti-Uşşaki Terzi Baba lineage since April 2001. He completed his spiritual and nafs training and received the rank of Halife (successor) in June 2022. He has been lecturing on Sufism since 2018. Additionally, he has been extensively studying astrology since 2020, completing Modules 1–8 at the Faculty of Astrological Studies, where he expects to be certified soon.

Ozan also holds a long-standing career as a researcher and academic. He is a faculty member in the Department of Chemistry at Istanbul Technical University with over 38 years of experience. He completed his PhD jointly at the University of Reading and Ege University in 1996, followed by postdoctoral research at University College London in 1998 and a Visiting Research Fellowship at the National Research Council of Canada between 2002 and 2005. He has led several high-budget national projects, published numerous scientific articles, supervised MSc and PhD students, and is the inventor of six national patents in advanced catalyst technologies for polyolefins.

Name: Yunli Shi

The Origin of the 24 Chinese Solar Terms as Seen from the Jade Artefacts Unearthed at the Neolithic Site in Lingjiatan

Biography:
Shi Yunli is Professor of the Department of History and Archaeology of Science and Technology, University of Science and Technology of China. He is also Co-Editor of the Journal of Astronomical History and Heritage. His major research interests include the transmission and reception of Islamic and European astronomy in China and East Asia, Chinese astronomical instruments, and the interaction between astronomy and Confucianism up to the Song to Qing Dynasties.

Name: Fabio Silva

At a crossroads in space and time: the archaeoastronomy of the Upper Iron Gates

Biography:
Fabio's interests lie with how prehistoric societies have perceived their environment (skyscape and landscape) and used that to time and adjust social, productive and magico-religious behaviours. His research is global, but in this field he has largely focused on Portugal, the United Kingdom (including Stonehenge) and Malta. Fabio has been teaching archaeoastronomy / skyscape archaeology at university level for 15 years. During which time he also published dozens of research papers and edited volumes, as well as co-founding and co-editing the Journal of Skyscape Archaeology for the past decade. His “outstanding contributions” to the fields of cultural astronomy and archaeoastronomy have led to him receiving the Carlos Jaschek Award from the European Society for Astronomy in Culture in 2016. He is a Visiting Research Fellow at Bournemouth University, teaches archaeoastronomy at The Skyscape Academy, and runs Stone x Sky – a consultancy focused on skyscape archaeology research, education and outreach.

Name: Florence Somer

From visionary mage to philosopher astrologer: the evolution of the figure of Jāmāsp from ancient Iran to the Ottoman court

Biography:
Florence Somer holds a PhD in Anthropology and the History of Religions (EPHE/PSL), with a strong focus on the philosophy and history of astronomical and astrological sciences. Her research explores the transmission of scientific knowledge from the Sasanian Empire to the Indian and Chinese worlds, the early Arab caliphates, and the Ottoman Empire.

She is currently a researcher in the History of Astronomy Department at the Paris Observatory, working within the EIDA project (Editing and Analyzing Historical Astronomical Diagrams with Artificial Intelligence). In this framework, she coordinates a multidisciplinary team—engineers, computer vision specialists, and historians of science—dedicated to producing detailed labels and annotations for a corpus of astronomical diagrams drawn from sources in Latin, Greek, Sanskrit, Chinese, Persian, Arabic, and Ottoman Turkish.

Her work brings together historical scholarship and cutting-edge AI methodologies to deepen our understanding of scientific visualization and knowledge transmission across cultures and centuries.

Name: John Steele

The Astral Sciences under the Achaemenid Persian Empire

Biography:
John Steele is Wilbour Professor of Egyptology and Assyriology at Brown University, He is a historian of astronomy whose work focuses on the astral sciences of astronomy and astrology in ancient Babylonian. He is also interested in the circulation of astral knowledge in the ancient world and the early modern reception of ancient science. He is the author of several books including most recently The Babylonian Astronomical Compendium MUL.APIN, co-authored with Hermann Hunger and published by Routledge in 2019. 

Name: Anupam Suman

“From Bhārata to Baghdad to Byzantium”: Interactions and Interconnections of Jyotiḥśāstra among Indian, Islamic, and European Astrologers

Biography:
Anupam Kumar Suman is a DPhil researcher in the Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Oxford, specialising in the critical edition and translation of Sanskrit astrological manuscripts, with a focus on the historical evolution and cross-cultural interaction of Jyotiḥśāstra. His doctoral research centres on producing a new edition and translation of Varāhamihira’s Bṛhadyātrā, with broader attention to various aspects of Greek, Indian and Middle Eastern astrology. He holds an MPhil in Classical Indian Religion from Oxford, an MA in Cultural Astronomy and Astrology from the University of Wales Trinity Saint David, and an MSc in Social Policy from the London School of Economics. Suman previously served for fifteen years as a senior civil servant in India. He is a Trustee of the Oxford Sanskrit Text Society.

Name: Seyyed Hadi Tabatabaei

Astronomy, astrology and observatory as a tool of power and politics: from Maraghe to Istanbul

Biography:
Seyyed Hadi Tabatabaei is PhD candidate in history of medicine in Iran University of Medical Science, Tehran, Iran. He finished his M.Sc. in History of astronomy from University of Tehran – Iran. He is fluent in Arabic, Persian, Ottoman and modern Turkish and English and is familiar with Syriac language. He is a Cataloger of manuscripts and he has cataloged manuscripts of some museums and libraries.

Maragheh Observatory and its scientific heritage, Astronomical writhing and Zijes in 13th – 16th centuries in Islamic civilization are other subjects of his research which he has written various articles about these subjects. The transmission of science, from Islamic world to west and its come back as modern science from west to Iran and ottoman empire are his areas of interests.

Name: Laura Tribuzio

Heavenly Signs and Intermediary Beings in the Persian Reception of the Brethren of Purity. Reading the Būstān al-ʿUqūl and the Mujmal al-ḥikma

Biography:
Laura Tribuzio is a Senior Researcher on the ERC Synergy Project MOSAIC at the Université Catholique de Louvain. She previously held a fellowship on the ERC Project PhilAnd (Warburg Institute / UCLouvain) and earned her PhD in the History of Sciences, focusing on Arabic and Persian intellectual traditions. Her research explores the role of the occult sciences in the organization of knowledge across the Islamicate world, especially the intersections of cosmology, esoteric doctrines, and prophetic authority in encyclopaedic writing. Within MOSAIC, she studies the Persian reception of the Rasāʾil Ikhwān al-Ṣafāʾ through the Mujmal al-ḥikma (13th c.), tracing how it reshapes the encyclopaedic model of knowledge and authority. Her work also examines music as a mathematical and cosmological science in Arabic, Persian, and Judeo-Arabic corpora, highlighting its link with number, harmony, and the occult arts.

Name: Ahmad Tunç Şen

What Is in a Name? Munajjims as Astral Experts

Biography:
A. Tunç Şen is an Associate Professor of History at Columbia University. He specializes in the history of the Ottoman Empire and its many connections with the early modern world. As a social and cultural historian of intellectual practices, Şen primarily focuses on how people perceive the world, the frameworks into which they fit information and beliefs, and the social, political, economic, and emotional structures that shaped and were shaped by their ways of knowing. He recently published his first book, entitled Forgotten Experts, Astrologers, Science, and Authority in the Ottoman Empire, 1400-1650 (Stanford University Press, 2025.)

Name: Hasan Umut

Astronomy in the Ottoman Hijaz: Texts, Figures, and Practices

Biography:
Hasan Umut is an Assistant Professor in the History Department at Boğaziçi University, Istanbul. He received his BSc in Industrial Engineering from Boğaziçi University and his MA in History from Istanbul Bilgi University. He obtained his PhD in Islamic Studies at McGill University, Montreal, Canada, with a dissertation titled "Theoretical Astronomy in the Early Modern Ottoman Empire: ʿAlī al-Qūshjī's Al-Risālaal-Fatḥiyya." His research interests include the history of astronomy, history of science in Islamic societies, Ottoman science, and the historiography of science.