Professor Carole Hillenbrand - curriculum vitae 

Born 3 May 1943. Nationality British. Home address: 10 Ventnor Terrace, Edinburgh, EH9 2BL, UK
 
Education
University of Cambridge (Modern and Medieval European Languages – French philosophy, Medieval Latin, Romance Linguistics – M.A.), University of Oxford (Oriental Languages – Arabic and Turkish – B.A.), and University of Edinburgh (research in medieval Islamic history - Ph.D)
 
Career
Lecturer of  English in Arya Mehr University in  Tehran where I lived from 1977-8.
University of Edinburgh, 1979-2009: Lecturer in Arabic, 1979-1990, Reader in Arabic and Islamic Studies (1990-2000), Professor of Islamic History (2000-2009)
Head of the Department of Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies (1997-2002, 2005-2009)
My undergraduate and postgraduate  teaching included  Arabic, classical Persian and medieval Turkish texts.
Postgraduate supervision of 63 Ph. D students, 1979-2009
University of Edinburgh,  2009-: Professor Emerita of Islamic History
University of St Andrews, 2013- : Professorial Fellow of Islamic History
University of St Andrews 2021: Honorary Professorship
 
Visiting Professorships
Visiting Professor at Dartmouth College, New Hampshire, USA, 1994 and 2005
Visiting Professor at the University of Groningen, The Netherlands, 2002
Visiting Professor at St Louis University, Missouri, USA, 2011, 2013, 2015, 2017
 
Major research interests
Islamic religious and political thought, Islamic mysticism,  the Muslim response to the Crusades, Medieval Iranian and Turkish history
 
Honours and prizes
British Academy Readership, 1994-1996
Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, 2000-
Fellow of the Royal Asiatic Society, 2003-
Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, 2003-
 
King Faisal Prize in Islamic Studies, 2005; this is the highest scholarly award in the Arab world. I am the first non-Muslim to receive it.
 
Fellow of the British Academy, 2007
 
*Received the award of Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) for Services to Higher Education in Queen Elizabeth II’s Birthday Honours List, 2009
 
Awarded an Honorary Life Fellowship at Somerville College, Oxford, 2010
Awarded a Corresponding Fellowship in the Medieval Academy of America, 2012
Received the British Society for Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies Award for Services to Middle Eastern Studies, 2015
 
Awarded the British Academy/Nayef Al Rodhan Prize for Global Cultural Understanding, 2016, for the book Islam: A Historical Introduction, Thames and Hudson, London, 2015
 
Received from Queen Elizabeth II in 2018 the award of Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) for Promoting a Better Understanding of Islam
 
 Publications
Four  substantial academic monographs, one annotated medieval Arabic translation, three edited books and sixty-five articles and book chapters
 
 Public service
 Islamic Advisory Editor, Edinburgh University Press, 1983-
Chief Examiner for the History of the Islamic World, International Baccalaureate, 1993-2002
Vice-President of the British Society for Middle Eastern Studies, 2003-2009
Service on the Advisory Boards of 4 Islamic academic journals
Trustee of the Gibb Memorial Trust, University of Cambridge, 2000-
Judge on the British/Kuwait Book Prize, 1999-
Judge on the Wolfson History Prize, 2018-
Delivered paper on common ground between Islam and Christianity at an inter-faith conference at UN Centre in Geneva in March 2017
 
 Outreach and media activities
Lectures on Islamic studies given in English, French, German and Arabic.
BBC Radio, regular talks on Islamic topics, 1996-
TV interviews in the UK, the USA and South Africa about Islam, 2000-
American PBS Television, interviewed in the programme, ‘Islam; Empire of Faith’, 2000-2001
Articles in magazines and newspapers on Jerusalem, on the Crusades, on jihad and on Baghdad, 2000-2005
Lectures on Islam to senior police officers at the Scottish Police College, 2007-2008
Interview about the Crusades with a reporter from Der Spiegel, which was then published in German in 2018
 

For more information, please visit the websites below:
https://www.ed.ac.uk/profile/carole-hillenbrand
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carole_Hillenbrand