Jan

Thiele

I am a scholar in Islamic intellectual history and its textual heritage. Using primarily a manuscript-based approach, my work covers the history of the Muʿtazila school and specifically its reception by the Zaydis, a Shiite community that has primarily survived in Yemen. This was the subject of two books, Kausalität in der muʿtazilitischen Kosmologie (Brill, 2011) and Theologie in der jemenitischen Zaydiyya (Brill, 2013), which won the Research Prize of the Annemarie Schimmel-Foundation for Islamic Studies. More recently, my research has focused on Ashʿari kalām, more specifically on one of the school's major figures, Abū Bakr al-Bāqillānī, and on the dissemination of Ashʿari doctrines in the Maghreb and al-Andalus. I am the co-editor of the volume Philosophical Theology in Islam: Later Ashʿarism East and West (along with Ayman Shihadeh; Brill, 2020) and of the journal Intellectual History of the Islamicate World.

In 2008, I earned a Magister Artium (M.A.) from Freie Universität Berlin. That same year, I joined the interdisciplinary doctoral programme at the Berlin Graduate School Muslim Cultures and Societies, also at Freie Universität Berlin, where I completed and defended my PhD in 2012. I remained at the university for one year as a team member on an ERC Advanced Grant project. In 2013, I began a two-year Marie Curie Fellowship (co-funded by the EU and the Gerda Henkel Foundation), during which I was a Visiting Scholar at SOAS University of London. My second Marie Curie Fellowship—funded by the European Union’s FP7 under the Intra-European Fellowship (IEF) scheme—took me to the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC) in Madrid. Following this, I was awarded a Ramón y Cajal Fellowship and became a permanent faculty member in 2021. I have held visiting positions, including a Visitorship at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, NJ (October 2017), and a Juynboll Fellowship at the Scaliger Institute, Leiden University (October 2025).