Salimeh Maghsoudlou

Postdoctoral Associate and Lecturer / Islamic Studies
203-436-9945
Rosenkranz Hall Room 248, 115 Prospect St., New Haven, CT 06520-8206

Salimeh Maghsoudlou is a Postdoctoral Associate and Lecturer in the Council on Middle East Studies at the MacMillan Center. Her work is mainly focused on the interrelation between different systems of thoughts within the Islamic world and during the classical period. She has a keen interest in the development of the history of Islamic theology (kalām) and in the ways that kalām interacts with Arabic philosophy (falsafa).         

In January 2016 she defended her doctoral dissertation in Islamic studies at Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes (Paris, France) where she formerly accomplished her Master degree in the same field. Her doctoral dissertation, an analytical study of ‘Ayn al-Quḍāt al-Hamadānī’s thoughts, focused its attention on one of the emblematic figure of “Philosophical Sufism”. Under this designation the modern scholarship gathers those Sufis who adopted philosophical thinking and made it a necessary part of their intellectual endeavor. In her dissertation Salimeh investigated the blurred boundaries between Avicennan philosophy, Aš‘arite theology and a nascent Ġazālian Sufism during the first decades of the twelfth century BC. Besides providing an integral French translation of al-Hamadānī’s Zubdat al-ḥaqā’iq (Quintessence of Truths) in her dissertation’s appendix and showed, in the course of her study, how al-Hamadānī, in search for a proper theory, embraced Avicenna’s philosophy with all the conundrum that such adaption would create in a post-Ġazālian area. During her stay at MacMillan center Salimeh will work on turning this dissertation into a book manuscript and will teach a course on the problem of evil in Islamic intellectual traditions.   

She is a native Persian speaker and studied Persian classical language and literature at Tehran University for her BA. Salimeh is the receiver of the silver medal at the national Olympiad of literature in Iran and was ranked third in the nationwide entrance exam for Iranian universities.