Simon Loynes

British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow

Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies
School of Languages, Literatures and Cultures

Email: simon.loynes@ed.ac.uk

Street: 2.27 (Jan-June '24)
19 George Square
City: Edinburgh
Post code: EH8 9LD

Biography

Background

Simon is currently undertaking a 3-year research project that investigates the relationship of the Qur’an to pre-Islamic poetry. He has previously worked as a Research Editor at Harvard University’s Project in Islamic Law and at the Knowledge, Information Technology, and the Arabic Book project at the Aga Khan University.

He is a specialist in the Qur’an and is particularly interested in its literary aspects, its relationship to early Arabic poetry, and its place in Late Antiquity. His research applies Digital Humanities methodologies to the study of the Qur’an, and he is interested, more broadly, in the digitisation of Arabic texts and the challenges presented by building large-scale digital corpora.

His first monograph, ‘Revelation in the Qur’an’, investigates the Qur’anic concept of revelation through the roots n-z-l and w-ḥ-y. It was published in early 2021 in Brill’s Texts and Studies on the Qurʾān series.

He holds a PhD in Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies from the University of Edinburgh (2019) and a MA in Islamic Societies and Cultures from the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London (2014).