Jennifer Fiona Griggs

Senior Researcher

Research Theme

A Christian Intellectual at the Centre of the Mongol Il-Khānate: Bar Hebraeus’ Encounter with Naṣīr al-Dīn al-Ṭūsī.

Academic and professional experience

Jennifer Griggs is a Senior Researcher at the Giorgio La Pira Library in Palermo, Italy.
Her research is on the interaction of the West Syrian maphrian Gregory Bar Hebraeus with the post-Avicennan philosophical tradition of Naṣīr al-Dīn al-Ṭūsī, in the inter-confessional environment of the medieval Islamicate East.
From 2018 to 2021, she held a postdoctoral fellowship Shaping Religious Pluralism between Christianity and Islam, at the University of Osnabrück in Germany.
In 2018, she was a Visiting Fellow at the Center for Religious Studies (CERES) at Ruhr Universität Bochum, also in Germany. She also worked on the Iraqi fellowship program with the British Institute for the Study of Iraq (BISI) in London.
She completed her PhD in 2015 at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) at the University of London.

Publications

Monograph

Gregory Barhebraeus' Mystical Hermeneutics of the Love of God in Dialogue with Islamic Tradition, Islamic History and Thought, Gorgias Press: Piscataway, October 2022.

Primary Sources

"Islamic Philosophy and Philosophers in Barhebraeus' Civil Chronicle", in David Taylor (ed.), Christian-Muslim Relations, Primary Sources 600-1500, Bloomsbury Academic, October 2023.

Chapter for the edited volume

"The Hermeneutics of Mysticism: Reading Mystic Texts as Traditions", in The Routledge Handbook of Comparative Mysticism [forthcoming volume].

Meetings, lectures and workshops

Book launch with discussion chaired by Dr. Erica C Hunter, at the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland, London, January 2023; held in person and streamed online.

Workshop Presentation. “Bar Hebraeus’ Syriac Spirituality and its Avicennan Epistemology”, for the Titus Brandsma Institute Fellows Meeting, University of Radboud, Nijmegen, Netherlands, May 2023.

Book panel. "Author Meets Critique: Gregory Barhebraeus' Mystical Hermeneutics of the Love of God in Dialogue with Islamic Tradition". Monograph discussion at the European Academy of Religion (EuARe), University of St Andrews, Scotland, June 2023.

Additional research activities

July/August 2023: Nicky B. Carpenter Fellowship at the Hill Manuscript Museum and Library (HMML), St John's University, Minnesota, USA.