Philip Wood - Biography#

Professor Philip Wood is the inaugural Tejpar Chair of Inter-Religious Studies at Aga Khan University, Institute for the Study of Muslim Civilisations (2021). He is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society. He was previously British Academy Post-doctoral fellow at Corpus Christi College, Oxford (2007); Osborne Fellow in Early Medieval History at Sidney Sussex college Cambridge (2010) before coming to AKU in 2012. He completed his DPhil with Averil Cameron at Oxford in 2007 and holds a BA in History from Cambridge with a double first, taking a distinction in Part I (2003).

Wood is a historian who works with sources in Syriac, Arabic and Greek to study religious minorities in the Roman, Sasanian and Abbasid empires (c.500-1000). He has published over 40 articles, as well as 3 monographs and 4 edited volumes/special issues. He was given a British Academy Mid-career Fellowship in 2019, which allowed him to complete his Princeton University Press monograph, The Imam of the Christians: The World of Dionysius of Tel-Mahre, 750-850 (2021). He was awarded a Gerda Henkel research award and other grants which now fund his research project on Group Formation in the Abbasid Caliphate (750-1000), which employs 4 postdocs. Through this project he has convened a series of conferences in London and Cambridge.

He has been MA coordinator for the MA in Muslim cultures (2013-17) and he was recently Head of Education (2022-23) and Acting Dean of the ISMC (2023). For this he was recognised with AKU’s Distinguished Leadership award in 2024.