Curriculum Vitae
Studies and Education
Dr. Manolis Ulbricht studied History (esp. with A. Demandt, H.-J. Gehrke, S. Esders), Islamic Studies (esp. with S. Schmidtke) and Protestant Theology (esp. with Ch. Markschies, H. Ohme) at the Freie Universität Berlin from 2003 to 2010. From 2005 to 2007 he studied Orthodox Theology, as well as Hellenistic and Late Antique History at the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens (esp. with A. Vοurlis, K. Buraselis, P. Athanassiadi).After receiving his Magister Artium in 2010, he went to Syria (Damascus, 2010-2012) for a two-year research stay. There he took classes in Qur’anic reading (tajwīd), Qur’anic interpretation (tafsīr), and the doctrine of God (tawḥīd) with Muslim scholars at the Umayyad Mosque, among others, lived and researched for extended periods in Rūm-Orthodox monasteries of the Christian Orient (Balamand, Hamatoura, Sinai, et al.) and deepened his knowledge of Arabic at the Institut français du Proche-Orient (2010-2011) as well as through private lessons in Arabic poetry, grammar, and modern Arabic literature.
Since 2006, Manolis Ulbricht has devoted himself to studying Byzantine music, Byzantine and Oriental music theory (oktōēchos/maqām), and Greek Orthodox liturgical studies (typikon). In addition to studying Greek-language hymnography in Athens and Berlin (since 2006), he learned Arabic hymnology and psalmody (tartīl) at the Patriarchate Church of Mariyamiyye in Damascus (Patriarchate of Antioch) and in the Rūm-Orthodox monasteries of Syria and Lebanon (2010-2012). Since then, he has supplemented his studies with stays in various monasteries of the Monastic Community of the Holy Mount Athos and in Greece, in Sinai, and at the Ecumenical Patriarchate in Istanbul (Patriarchate of Constantinople). After his studies at the Corelli Conservatory (Rhodes, 2014-2018), he passed the examination to obtain the teaching qualification (diplōma) of the Greek Ministry of Education in Byzantine Sacred Music in 2020, after two years of postgraduate studies (2018-2020) at the National Conservatory in Athens.
For more information, see also here.
Academic Positions and Residencies
From 2012 to 2015, he completed his Ph.D. in Byzantine Studies at the Freie Universität Berlin on the oldest translation of the Qur’an with a scholarship from the German National Academic Foundation (Studienstifung des deutschen Volkes). The three-volume dissertation Coranus Graecus procured the Greek-Arabic edition with German translation, a philological-comparative commentary, and a bilingual glossary of the Greek translation of the Qur’an, which survives in fragmentary form in the anti-Islamic polemic “Refutation of the Qur’an” by Nicetas of Byzantium (9th century) (supervisors Jannis Niehoff-Panagiotidis and Angelika Neuwirth). From 2008 to 2010, Manolis Ulbricht worked in his teacher Angelika Neuwirth’s Corpus Coranicum of the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities and, from 2013 to 2016, as her research assistant in the Arabic sub-project “From Logos to Kalām” at the Collaborative Research Centre (CRC/SFB) 980 “Episteme in Motion” (FU Berlin). From 2016 to 2019, Manolis Ulbricht was a postdoctoral researcher at the Chair of Byzantine Studies (FU Berlin) and in the third-party funded project “Aristotle’s Poetics in the West (of India) from Antiquity to the Renaissance” led by Dimitri Gutas and Beatrice Gründler (Einstein Foundation Berlin).During his research stay on Mount Athos and in Athens (2018-2022), Manolis Ulbricht devoted himself to manuscript studies in connection with his research activities on the Documenta Coranica Christiana, and researched and taught as a visiting lecturer at the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens and the National Hellenic Research Foundation. Upon his return to Germany, he was a visiting scholar at the Ludwigs-Maximilians-University of Munich (Institute of Byzantine Studies, Byzantine Art History, and Neo-Grecian Studies) from May to October 2022, before moving to the Institute of Arabic and Islamic Studies I at the Georg August University of Göttingen as research fellow in the research project “Late Antiquity and Early Islamic Studies” (LAESSI).
For further information see the websites at FU Berlin and LMU Munich.
Teaching and Teaching Projects
Manolis Ulbricht has taught in Berlin, Athens, and Göttingen at bachelor’s and master’s levels, and designed and taught different doctoral and postdoctoral schools in Bologna and Thessaloniki in German, English, and Greek. His courses cover topics in Byzantine history, Greek philology, Orthodox theology and dogmatics, Christian-Muslim relations, Byzantine hymnology and liturgical studies, and Islamic intellectual history, among others.Within the framework of research-oriented teaching, he regularly offers “research internships”, attended by students from Germany, Mexico, Italy, North Africa, and Greece, among others. Together with his students and interns, Manolis Ulbricht developed didactically-oriented teaching and e-learning projects and successfully acquired funding. In cooperation with the Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin – Preußischer Kulturbesitz as well as researchers of the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities (Prof. Dr. Drs. h.c. Dieter Harlfinger) and the Göttingen Academy of Sciences and Humanities in Lower Saxony (Dr. Ute Pietruschka), he produced educational films on working with Greek and Arabic manuscripts as well as their metadata and digital data.