Petra Sijpesteijn elected to the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres
The Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres (AIBL), one of the five academies that make up the Institut de France, has elected professor Petra Sijpesteijn as foreign corresponding member (correspondant étranger), to fill the seat of the renowned Egyptologist Edda Bresciani.
The Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres is one of the oldest and most prestigious learned societies in Europe. It was founded in 1663 and brings together leading scholars in a wide variety of historical and philological disciplines, equally divided over the fields of Oriental Studies, Ancient History, Medieval Studies, and Early Modern and Modern Studies. The AIBL acts as patron to a large number of highly significant projects of excavation, documentation, and analysis of material and written sources from all over the world. It boasts the world’s oldest continuing journal devoted to the humanities (the Journal des Savants, which has run virtually without interruption since 1665), and has a long tradition of bringing the world’s leading scholars to Paris to present new finds and new analyses in its monthly sessions.
Although not the only Dutch scholar to join this learned society, Petra Sijpesteijn is currently the only Dutch scholar elected to the AIBL with an appointment at a Dutch university. Her work on the earliest centuries of Islamic history rests on her unique competence in the reading and analysis of Arabic papyri, which has enabled her to re-energize the field of early Islamic history and to restore to the early Islamic world dynamism and diversity.
For more information about Petra Sijpesteijn’s work, please see her Leiden University profile page and the research project website, Embedding Conquest.
For more information about the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres, see here.