Petra M. Sijpesteijn (Principal Investigator) is professor of Arabic. Her research concentrates on recovering the experiences of Muslims and non-Muslims living under Islamic rule, using the vast stores of radically under-used documents surviving from the early Islamic world. Professor Sijpesteijn is PI of the NWO funded VICI research project “Land, Space, Power: Landscapes of the Early Caliphate” (2025-2030).
Kyle Longworth is a postdoc in the NWO-funded VICI project Land, Space, Power: Landscapes of the Early Caliphate. He is a social and cultural historian of the late antique and early Islamic Middle East. As part of the project, his work uses epigraphic evidence to trace the movement of people, goods, and culture across the early Islamic world (c. 600–900 CE). By reconstructing these pathways, his research focuses on how shifting patterns of taxation, trade, and pilgrimage helped transform the late antique Middle East into an Islamic one. Prior to joining Leiden University, Kyle was a Postdoctoral Teaching Fellow at the University of Chicago, where he earned his PhD in 2022. His dissertation, “Islamic Bureaucrats in Late Antiquity: Administration and Elites during the Umayyad Caliphate (c. 661–750 CE),” examined the symbiotic relationship between the early Islamic state-building and the emergence of a religiously and ethnically diverse governing elite.
Katarína (Kate) Mokránová is a PhD candidate in the NWO-funded VICI project Land, Space, Power: Landscapes of the Early Caliphate, led by Prof. Petra Sijpesteijn. Her research explores the spatiality and materiality of early Islamic burial practices in West Asia and North Africa (c. 650–1250 CE), by investigating how funerary landscapes developed across time and space. Examining the placement, distribution, and construction of burials, and situating these within the context of earlier regional traditions, she studies burial practice as a discursive process and an act of place-making.
Finn Lindo-Dunn is a PhD candidate in the NWO-funded VICI project Land, Space, Power: Landscapes of the Early Caliphate, led by Prof. Petra Sijpesteijn. His research examines place-making through literature, with a particular focus on how the landscapes of North Africa became ‘Islamic’. His interests deal with the projection of social and collective memory in the geography of North Africa (c.650-1250 CE). By investigating how divergent symbolic interpretations of the landscape emerged from different social, political and cultural contexts within the Classical Arabic literary canon, his research seeks to understand how natural and built features of the landscape became ‘storied’ in the pre-modern Arab-Islamic geographical conscience.
Rick van Brummelen is a Student Research Assistant in the project Land, Space, Power: Landscapes of the Early Caliphate. Currently, he is gathering data on grave sites in literary sources. His main interests include identity formation within the religious and cultural history of early Islamic South-West Asia and North Africa. He holds a Bachelor’s degree in History and a Bachelor’s degree in Islamic Studies, both from Radboud University. Currently, he is a Research Master’s student in the Middle Eastern Studies program at Leiden University.
René Spitz (Volunteer Research Assistant) contributes as a volunteer to the Land, Space and Power project. He is a retired Dutch international officer and diplomate with work experience in the MENA-region, notably Syria and Algeria. His main field of experience are asylum and migration issues. He has a PhD in social sciences (2014) and an MA Middle Eastern Studies (2024); both from Leiden University. He published on state-civil society relations in Syria as well as on the Hirak movement in Algeria. By participating in the project, he hopes to increase his understanding of migration in the early years of the Arab World. By reading Arabic sources, he aims at further improving his Arabic language skills.