Postdoc in Byzantine Studies

About the person

Selected interviews, speeches, et alia, please click here

From 2016 to 2021, Manolis Ulbricht is Research and Teaching Assistant to the Chair of Berlin Byzantine Studies. He has been Research Assistant coordinating the Project entitled “Aristotle’s Poetics in the West (of India) from Antiquity to the Renaissance: A Multilingual Edition with Studies of the Cultural Contexts of the Syriac, Arabic, Hebrew, and Latin Translations” funded by the Einstein Foundation Berlin from 2016 to 2019. As holder of a Feodor Lynen Postdoc Research Fellowship of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation he is affiliated with the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens in the Department of Byzantine Philology and Folkloristics from 2019 to 2021. In 2021/22, he is visiting scholar at the National Hellenic Research Foundation with a DAAD Postdoc Fellowship.

Manolis Ulbricht studied Ancient History, Islamic Studies and Protestant as well as Orthodox Theology at the Freie Universität Berlin and the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin (2003–2010) and the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens (2005–2007). After two years of further studies and field research in Damascus (2010–2012), he went on pursuing a doctoral degree in Byzantine Studies (2012–2015). His dissertation “Coranus Graecus”  will soon be published by the Vatican Library in its series Studi e testi.

He has been dispatched to the Monastic Community of the Holy Mountain Athos and to the National Library of Greece by the Freie Universität Berlin (2018/19) to research manuscripts and archives. His research aims at developing an interdisciplinary project which shall explore Qur’anic translations into Greek, Latin and Syriac and their reception in a historical and diachronic manner from the Christian perspective.

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Overview of Didactic Approaches

Berlin Byzantine Studies prides itself for effectively integrating the ongoing research conducted by the chair of Byzantine Studies into its students’ regular curriculum in accordance with the Freie Universität Berlin’s future-oriented institutional strategy. Through this research-orientated teaching, our students and the students of neighboring disciplines can be actively introduced to the questions arising from ongoing research projects in an interdisciplinary manner

Therefore, we regularly offer ‘research internships’ that undergraduate as well as masters students may attend. It is our goal to introduce our students to the methods and approaches of this future-orientated teaching as early as possible.

Another characteristic example of a sustainable combination of research and teaching at Berlin Byzantine Studies is the conceptualization of and successful application for the teaching project “The Digitization of Philology – Corpus Coranicum Christianum”. The project was designed by and for students and directly integrates the research into the regular teaching curriculum.

Moreover, our professorship is actively involved in the digitization of the humanities. A concrete expression of this commitment is the securing of the 2019 E-Learning-Project “Methods for Digitally Indexing and Compiling Digital Editions in the Philology of the Christian Orient: from Digitizations of Handwritten Text to a Digital Edition (</xml>)”. From the winter semester 2019/20 until the summer semester 2021, we offered an introductory course and an advanced training course respectively in the digital humanities.

We foster this kind of interaction between researchers and students at all levels!

Teaching Materials for Students and Teachers

Here you will find teaching materials created by Manolis Ulbricht for his various courses and teaching formats. These are materials on digital humanities, basic philological work, and paleography/codicology. The course materials are available for open access download at this link.

Evaluation by the Students

The courses taught by Manolis Ulbricht are evaluated by the students themselves in the course of each term. If you would like to gain an overview of the teaching evaluations, you can find the feedback from students with regards to Manolis Ulbricht’s course offerings under the following link:

• Evaluations of Courses, Research Internships and Erasmus+ Internships

Courses and Teaching Formats

• Supervision of Ph.D. and Postdoc Schools

• Doctoral Committees

• Master Courses

• Bachelor Courses

• Research Internships

Byzantium and Early Islam

• Muslim-Christian Relations in Early Islam
• Byzantine Apologetics and Polemics against Islam

See Ph.D. Thesis: “Coranus Graecus. The Oldest Transmitted Translation of the Qur’ ān within the  «Ἀνατροπὴ τοῦ Κορανίου» of Nicetas of Byzantium. Introduction, Text, Translation, Commentary”

Abstract, Table of Contents, Disputatio (14/07/2015), Exposé (2012)

Muslim Qur’anic Studies and Christian Translations of the Qur’an

• Greek Translations of the Qur’an and their Reception in the Latin Middle Ages
• Efforts for the Establishment of an Interdisciplinary Research Project “Corpus Coranicum Christianum”

Project Description Corpus Coranicum Byzantinum (presented in the frame of the Disputatio, 14/07/2015)

Byzantine Theology and Heresiology

• The Orthodoxy of Byzantium
• East Christian Heterodoxies

Byzantine Hymnology and Psalmody

• Music Theory of Byzantine Church Music
• Common Music Traditions in Near Eastern Liturgical Practices

Digital Humanities

• E-Learning-Project “Methods for Digitally Indexing and Compiling Digital Editions in the Philology of the Oriens Christianus: from Digitizations of Handwritten Text to a Digital Edition </xml>”
• Teaching Project “Digitization of Philology – The Corpus Coranicum Christianum”