Dr Bakinaz Abdalla

• PhD. Jewish Studies, McGill University
• MA. Near Eastern Languages and Cultures, Indiana University

I obtained  a PhD in Jewish Philosophy from McGill University in 2019, under the supervision of Professors Carlos Fraenkel and Lawrence Kaplan. Before graduation, I had started a Junior Research Fellowship at the Maimonides Centre for Advanced Studies, University of Hamburg where I had the great opportunity to work on scepticism in Jewish and Islamic thought with a group of philosophers and researchers in the Islamic and Jewish traditions. I then moved to Wolfson College, University of Oxford, as a Junior Research Fellow where I continued working on questions related to scepticism and the question of the relationship between Reason and Faith. Currently, I hold a Post-doctoral Research Fellowship in Jewish Philosophy of Religion, in affiliation with the Global Philosophy of Religion Project led by Prof. Yujin Nagasawa.

My research focuses on the reception of Islamic philosophy by medieval Jewish philosophers, particularly as represented in the school of Jewish Averroism. The major epistemological and metaphysical questions that preoccupied the members of this significant school of thought and the meta-philosophical question of the relationship between Reason and Faith  are all central to my research.  My current research, conducted in collaboration with the Global Philosophy of Religion team, addresses questions of Philosophy of Religion from a Jewish prospective. I also am interested in Digital Humanities and explore the possibility of applying Digital Humanities tools to solve problems related to medieval philosophical texts, such as author-verification and text similarity.