Alberto Tiburcio

Alberto Tiburcio received his PhD from McGill University’s Institute of Islamic Studies in 2015. Before coming to the MPIWG he worked as a postdoctoral researcher at the Center for Near and Middle Eastern Studies at the Philipps-Universität Marburg. His book Muslim-Christian Polemics in Safavid Iran (in press, Edinburgh University Press) explores the history of theological exchanges between Catholic missionaries and Shi‘i ‘ulama in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. It contributes to debates on the nature of interreligious relations, cultural translation, and confessionalization in the early modern Middle East. He has also published in journals like Iranian Studies and Eurasian Studies, and has contributed entries to the multivolume reference work Christian-Muslim Relations: A Bibliographical History (Brill).

At the MPIWG, he is working with Prof. Dr. Sonja Brentjes on the project Mediterranean Nautical Cartography: Islands or Gateways of Knowledge? He is focusing on the visual and textual elements of two sixteenth-century Tunisian atlases, in the quest to understand the ways in which they account for the circulation of knowledge and the conformation of a common semiotic repertoire in the early modern Mediterranean realm.