Liana Saif

In 2021, Liana Saif (PhD, 2012) joined the Centre for the Study of Hermetic Philosophy and Related Currents at the University of Amsterdam as Assistant Professor in the History of Esotericism in the Middle Ages. Prior, she was a research associate as the Warburg Institute and the Université Catholique de Louvain, and held the British Academy post-doctoral fellowship at The University of Oxford (St Cross). Saif’s work focuses on Islamic esotericism and the occult sciences, with a special interest in the exchange of esoteric and occult knowledge between the Islamic and Latin ecumenes. Her book The Arabic Influences on Early Modern Occult Philosophy was published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2015. She is currently preparing a long-awaited critical translation from Arabic into English of Maslama b. Qāsim al-Qurṭubī’s (d. 964) Ghāyat al-ḥakīm, known in its Latin translation as the Picatrix. She has conducted research on the tenth-century secret brotherhood Ikhwān al-Ṣafāʾ (The Brethren of Purity), the pseudo-Aristotelian Hermetica, and Jābir ibn Ḥayyān (Geber in Latin). She also worked as a project curator at the British Museum, deepening her interest in the material and artistic manifestations of the occult and the esoteric. For her publications, visit https://sas.academia.edu/LianaSaif
Saif is a founding member of the European Network for the Study of Islam and Esotericism (ENSIE). Editorial roles include being a board member for Aries: Journal for the Study of Western Esotericism and Brill’s Islamic Translation Series, and an associate editor of the journal Early Science and Medicine.
Address: Amsterdam, The Netherlands