Dr. Manolis Ulbricht
Dr. Manolis Ulbricht has been a research associate in the third-party funded project „Late Antiquity and Early Islamic Studies“ (LAESSI)“ since October 2022. This project is funded by the Volkswagen Foundation within the framework of the funding initiative “Momentum” and has a duration of seven years (2022-2029). In the LAESSI project, Manolis Ulbricht is responsible for researching, translating, and editing Greek Byzantine sources from c. 300-900 AD.
Manolis Ulbricht received his Ph.D. in Byzantine Studies from Freie Universität (FU) Berlin in 2015, with a critical Greek-Arabic edition of the surviving fragments of the oldest translation of the Qur’an (Vat. gr. 681). Since then, he has been a research associate in various positions and projects at the FU Berlin (2013-2019), a visiting lecturer at the University of Athens (2019-2021), and a visiting researcher at the National Hellenic Research Foundation (2021-2022) and the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich (2022). Research visits over several years have taken him to Syria, Lebanon, and the Sinai (2010-2012 continuously), as well as to the Monastic Community of the Holy Mount Athos and the Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople for manuscript research (several times since 2016).
His research interests are in the areas of:
- Christian-Muslim relations from the 7th to 12th centuries
- Greek, Syriac, and Latin translations of the Qur’an and their interdisciplinary study
- Byzantine edition and manuscript studies
- Digital Humanities and creation of online databases (XML TEI)
- Greek-Byzantine hymnology and hymnography, as well as oriental music theory (oktōēchos and maqām)
- Greek Orthodox dogmatic and ecclesiastical history and the relationship to the papacy (9th - 11th centuries)