Profile

Yasemin Gökpınar's research focuses on Arabic music theory and culture, Greek-Arabic translations, and manuscript culture. She has been working as a research associate (managing assistant) at the Seminar for Oriental and Islamic Studies at Ruhr-Universität Bochum (RUB) since April 2018 and simultaneously as a research associate at the Academy of Sciences (ÖAW) in Vienna since October 2018. Yasemin Gökpınar is an Arabist, Islamic scholar, and musicologist who received her PhD in Bochum in 2016 with a thesis on "Courtly Music Practice in Medieval Arab-Islamic Culture from the Abbasid Period to the Mamluks."
From 2013 to 2014, she worked as a research assistant in the ERC project "Glossarium Graeco-Arabicum" (Greek-Arabic lexical database) at the Seminar for Oriental and Islamic Studies (RUB), and from 2015-2018 she was a research associate at Goethe University, Frankfurt am Main. Since October 2018, she is a research associate in the ERC project "Ancient Music Beyond Hellenisation" at the ÖAW, Vienna.

At RUB, she held seminars on modern Arabic and Turkish literature until her doctorate. At Goethe University in Frankfurt am Main, she taught Arabic manuscript studies and editing techniques, also using the editing program Classical Text Editor. Other teaching topics include music culture and theory from the Abbasids to the present, critical subject history, theoretical philosophy, and Arabic exilic poetry. Yasemin Gökpınar is co-applicant of the DAAD project "Ana wa-ant in performative world approaches" in the framework of the “University Dialogue with the Islamic World” in cooperation with the universities of Göttingen, Nizwa (Oman) and Jendouba (Tunisia).

Research interests

• Cultural and intellectual history in classical Islam
• Arabic music theory in the context of theoretical philosophy
• History of science
• Arabic-Greek translation movement
• Manuscript culture, codicology and edition philology
• Arabic literature in history and present

Research projects

„Ana wa-ant in performativen Weltzugängen,“ internationales Lehr- und Forschungsprojekt (Hochschuldialog mit der islamischen Welt, DAAD, 2023)

„Ancient Music Beyond Hellenisation“, (2018-2024)
AMBH https://www.oeaw.ac.at/en/oeai/research/classical-studies/ancient-music/ancient-music-beyond-hellenisation

"The Oriental Manuscripts in Arabic Script of the Senckenberg University Library, Frankfurt am Main" (since 2017).

This project makes accessible the manuscripts in Arabic script of the Senckenberg University Library, Frankfurt am Main. The corpus of approximately 120 manuscripts in Arabic, Ottoman and Persian language was partly indexed physically and in terms of content as part of two project courses "Forschendes Lernen" (University Program "Forschendes Lernen", RUB, and Förderfonds Lehre, Goethe University Frankfurt/Main). The students researched both the digitized manuscripts and the physical manuscripts in the library under guidance. After revision and completion, the results will be incorporated into a catalog.