Josef W. Meri

Who is Josef W. Meri?

Josef Waleed Meri is a leading specialist in medieval Islamic history and civilization, social history, the history of the Jewish communities of the Middle East and the academic study of interfaith relations. He is the eighth Allianz Visiting Professor of Islamic Studies at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich. He was a Fellow of St. Edmund's College, Cambridge, and a Visiting Fellow at the Centre of Islamic Studies, Cambridge University.

He was born in Chicago in 1969 and comes from a Jerusalemite family. He received a B.A. degree from University of California, Berkeley in 1992, an M.A. degree from State University of New York Binghamton in 1995 and a D.Phil degree from Wolfson College, Oxford, Oxford University in 1999.

From 2010-2013 he served as Academic Director of the Centre for the Study of Muslim-Jewish Relations, Woolf Institute, Cambridge. From 2005-2010 he served as Special Scholar in Residence and coordinator of the Great Tafsirs of the Qur'an project at the Royal Aal al-Bayt Institute for Islamic Thought, Amman, Jordan which is under the patronage of Abdallah II, King of Jordan. He is a lifetime fellow of the Institute.