Staff research
Information on areas of staff research interest
Research focus and interests
Professor Abdullah Saeed
Professor Saeed is currently Sultan of Oman Professor of Arab and Islamic Studies (since 2004), the Director of the National Centre for Contemporary Islamic Studies and the Convenor of Islamic Studies at the University of Melbourne. He is an active researcher, focusing on one of the most important issues in Islamic thought today: the negotiation of text and context, ijtihad and interpretation.
- Negotiation of text and context, ijtihad and interpretation in Islamic thought
- Qur’anic hermeneutics
- Islamic law reform
- Islamic law and freedom of religion
- Islam and human rights
- Islamic thought in Indonesia
- Muslim communities in Australia
- Christian-Muslim relations
Professor Abdullah Saeed staff profile
Dr Abdul-Samad Abdullah
Dr Abdullah is Senior Lecturer in Arabic Studies at the University of Melbourne. His primary research focus is Linguistics structures (including grammar).
- Arabic poetry of West Africa/ West African Arabic literature
- Arabic poetry in Qur’anic narratives
- Modern and classical Arabic literature
- Arabic rhetoric and stylistics
- Modern Islamic thought
- Qur’anic exegesis
- Islam in West Africa
Dr Abdul-Samad Abdullah staff profile
Dr Muhammad Kamal
Dr Kamal is Senior Lecturer in Islamic Studies at the University of Melbourne. His primary research focus is Muslim Philosophy, including the Principality of Essence and the Principality of Being. His latest academic paper examines the relationship between existence and essence in Mulla Sadra’s ontology.
- Modern Islamic thought
- Philosophies of Hegel
- Western Existentialism
- Philosophies of Heidegger
- Mulla Sadra’s existential philosophy
Dr Muhammad Kamal staff profile
Associate Professor Richard Pennell
Associate Professor Richard Pennell is Assoc. Professor of History at the University of Melbourne. His primary research focus is history, colonialism and jihad. His latest academic paper examines the differences between archived material that was always a digital record and hard-copy archives that were subsequently digitised, particularly in relation to how the archives of regimes in the Middle East and North Africa that collapsed between 1990 and 2011 were digitised.
- Modern political history
- History of North Africa, particularly Morocco and Libya
- History of criminal trials abroad and national identity
- History of armed jihad