Christian Lange

Christian Lange (PhD Harvard, 2006) is Professor and Chair of Arabic and Islamic Studies at the University of Utrecht and a fellow of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Art and Sciences. His research focuses on premodern Islamic intellectual and cultural history, particularly in the areas of Islamic eschatology, Islamic law and legal theory, Islamic mysticism, and the Muslim sensorium. Since joining Utrecht University in 2011, he has been the principal investigator of the ERC Starting Grant project "The here and the hereafter in Islamic traditions" (HHIT, 2011-2015), as well as of the ERC Consolidator Grant project "The senses of Islam" (SENSIS, 2017-2022).

Lange's Justice, punishment and the medieval Muslim imagination (Cambridge 2008, Arab. tr. 2016) is a study of state violence and conceptions of justice under the Seljuq dynasty (11th-13th c.) in political, eschatological, and legal terms. He has co-edited a collection of essays on the topic of public violence in Islamic societies (Edinburgh 2009), as well as a multi-author volume on the Seljuq dynasty (Edinburgh 2011). He is also the author of Paradise and hell in Islamic traditions (Cambridge 2016), winner of the 2016 British-Kuwait Friendship Society Bookprize and the joint winner of the 2016 World Award for Book of the Year in Iran. In addition, he has edited volumes on hell in Islamic traditions, Locating hell in Islamic traditions (Leiden 2015 [Open Access]), on the comparison between Ius commune and Sharia (Tübingen 2018), on the Utrecht Orientalist Adriaan Reland (d. 1718) (Leiden 2021 [Open Access]), and on Sufi cosmology (Leiden 2022). His most recent monograph is Mohammed. Perspectieven op de Profeet (Amsterdam 2017).

He welcomes inquiries about Research Master and PhD supervision, particularly in regard to projects straddling Islamic Studies and the Study of Religion.v