Verena Klemm

Verena Klemm is Principal Investigator of the research project Bibliotheca Arabica – Towards a New History of Arabic Literature at the Saxon Academy of Sciences and Humanities in Leipzig, of which she is a full member. She is Professor Emerita of Arabic and Islamic Studies at Leipzig University, where she held the Chair of Arabic and Islamic Studies from 2003 to 2022. She received her PhD in Islamic Studies from the University of Tübingen in 1988 and completed her habilitation at the University of Hamburg in 1997.
Her research focuses on Arabic literary history, manuscript cultures, and the intellectual heritage of the Islamicate world. She has led numerous research projects funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG), concentrating on the cataloguing, analysis, and historical study of Arabic manuscript collections held at Leipzig University Library. Among these is a project on the Rifāʿīya Collection, a private library from Ottoman Damascus that has been preserved in Leipzig since the nineteenth century.
She is editor of the series Bibliotheca Arabica – Towards a New History of Arabic Literature (Brill, Leiden) and co-editor of the book series Literatures in Context: Arabic–Persian–Turkish (Reichert, Wiesbaden).

Verena is a member of the advisory board and contributes to kalimat as an author.