Wellcome Trust Associate Professor
MA, DPhil, MPhil (Oxon); MA (Leiden); PCAPP (Warwick); FRAS

(An Arabic version of this page is available here)

Personal Profile:

After studying Classics, French, and Islamic Studies in Paris (Sorbonne), Hamburg, and Tübingen, I took an MA in Islamic Studies at the University of Leiden, and an M.Phil. and D.Phil in Classics at the University of Oxford (Corpus Christi College). As an undergraduate, my prime motivation in choosing Classics was to understand ‘our’ Western culture, for surely its two main roots were Graeco-Roman Antiquity and the Judaeo-Christian tradition. Little did I know that a third ‘root’, Islamic culture, is intrinsically linked to our own tradition, a fact conveniently forgotten by ideologues of different persuasions. My teaching and research therefore tries to rectify this misconception by investigating the many contacts between Muslims, Jews, and Christians writing in Greek, Latin, Hebrew, and Arabic, be it in the tenth or the twentieth century.

Teaching:

Undergraduate:

History of Medicine from the Ancient World to the Classical Ages of Islam

Postgraduate:

Pauline Koetschet (Ph.D., jointly with Nice): ‘Melancholy in the Medieval Islamic Period: Theory and Practice within Their Societal Context’

I am extremely interested in supervising M.A. or Ph.D. students in any aspect of medical history in antiquity and the medieval Islamic period. Generous bursaries are available from the Wellcome Trust; see here and here for further information. 

Research:

Peter E Pormann is primarily concerned with the transmission of the Greek medical and scientific heritage into the Islamic world. He has published on medicine and philosophy in Late Antique Alexandria, Greek-Syriac -Arabic translation technique, the history of mental illness and hospital provisions in tenth-century Baghdad, and medieval Islamic medicine more generally.

At Warwick, he is currently pursuing a major research project entitled Medicine and Society in Tenth-century Baghdad: Between Greek Theory and Islamic Practice. Moreover, he is also involved in the Wellcome Trust funded project ‘Galen’s Commentaries on Hippocrates’ Epidemics: Edition and Translation of the Arabic Version of Books One and Two’.

Together with Peter Adamson, he is finalising an English translation of al-Kindi's philosophical works for OUP. Other projects include an edition of the Arabic fragments of Ibn Sarābiyūn’s Small Compendium, and an English translation and commentary of the same text to be published in the series Translated Text for Historians (LUP).

He also has an interest in Hebrew studies and Jewish life in England during the High Middle Ages and the Renaissance, as well as the reception of Classical literature and culture in the modern Arab world.

Recent Publications [for a more details, please click here]

• (ed.), Rufus of Ephesus On Melancholy, SAPERE 13 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2008)
• with A. A. Akasoy, J. Montgomery (eds.), Islamic Crosspollinations: Interactions in the Medieval Middle East (Oxford: Oxbow, 2007)
• with E. Savage-Smith, Medieval Islamic Medicine, Islamic Surveys (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007), xiv, 223 pp.  [North America edition: (Washington: Georgetown University Press, 2007)] [Middle East edition: (Cairo: American University of Cairo Press, 2007)] [reviewed in Nature, Isis, Bibliotheca Orientalis, American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences, and Arab News]
• ‘Medical Methodology and Hospital Practice: The Case of Tenth-century Baghdad’, in: P. Adamson (ed.), In the Age of al-Farabi: Arabic Philosophy in the 4th/10th Century [Warburg Institute Colloquia 12] (London: Warburg Institute, 2008), 95–118
  
• ‘Case Notes and Clinicians: Galen’s Commentary on the Hippocratic Epidemics in the Arabic Tradition’, Arabic Sciences and Philosophy, 18.2 (Sept. 2008), 247–84
• ‘Islamic Hospitals in the time of al-Muqtadir’ in Abbasid Studies II: Occasional Papers of the School of ‘Abbasid Studies, Leuven, 28 June – 1 July 2004, ed. J. Nawas, Orientalia Lovaniensia Analecta 177 (Leuven; Dudley, Mass.: Peeters, 2008), 337–82
  
• ‘Medisch Onderwijs in de Late Oudheid: Van Alexandrië naar Montpellier’, Geschiedenis der Geneeskunde 12.3 (2008), 175–80
  
  

Forthcoming Publications

• (ed.), Islamic Medical and Scientific Tradition, Critical Concepts in Islamic Studies, 4 vols (Routledge: London, 2010)
  
• with P. Adamson (trs.), Al-Kindi’s Philosophical Works (Karachi: Oxford University Press, 2010)

For a CV with a full list of publications, please click here.

 

 Peter E Pormann recently appeared on the BBC World Service documentary ‘Secret Scientists’; to listen again, please click here.

Peter E Pormann appeared in the BBC documentary ‘Science and Islam’, part 1, broadcast on 5 Jan 2009. Watch it again on youtube.

Peter E Pormann appeared on In Our Time with Melvyn Bragg, discussing the Graeco-Arabic translation movement. For more information and to listen again, click here.

[reviewed in Nature, Isis, Bibliotheca Orientalis, and Arab News]