Professor Andrew Rippin Joins IIS as Senior Research Fellow

Professor Andrew Rippin has joined The Institute of Ismaili Studies as Senior Research Fellow in the Qur’anic Studies Unit of the Department of Academic Research and Publications. 

Professor Rippin is one of the foremost authorities in the study of the Qur’an and Qur’anic exegesis. He is Professor Emeritus of Islamic History at the University of Victoria in Canada, where he was also the Dean of the Faculty of Humanities from 2000-2010. He has also been a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada since 2006.

For a number of years, Professor Rippin has been involved in the Institute’s workshops and publications in various capacities. On joining the IIS he said:

“I have been consistently impressed with the work the Qur’anic Studies Unit has done at the Institute and I am excited to be able to join this group of scholars in their projects. This will be an enriching environment for me to work in and one to which I hope I can make a contribution.”

Professor Rippin began his academic career in Islamic Studies at the University of Toronto with an undergraduate degree in Religious Studies, after which he received a PhD from McGill University in Montreal. His dissertation was on the Qur’anic ‘occasions of revelation’ (asbab al-nuzul). He taught at the University of Calgary for 20 years before moving to Victoria.

Professor Rippin is the author of a number of books, including The Qur’an and its Interpretative Tradition (2001) and the two-volume textbook, Muslims, Their Religious Beliefs and Practices which was originally published in 1990 and is now in its fourth revised edition. He is also well-known for his edited volumes, among which are the influential Approaches to the History of the Interpretation of the Qur’an (1988), The Qur’an: Style and Contents (2001) and the Blackwell Companion to the Qur’an (2006). Professor Rippin has also written some 400 articles, book chapters, encyclopaedia entries and book reviews. He has lectured in universities the world over and is a member of several distinguished editorial and journal advisory boards, including Oxford Bibliographies: Islamic Studies, Brill’s Encyclopaedia of the Qur’an, the Journal of Qur’anic Studies, Arabica and the Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies.