David Vishanoff

David Vishanoff earned his Ph.D. in West and South Asian Religions, with a focus on Islamic thought, at Emory University, after completing an M.A. in Religious Studies at the University of Colorado. His research is principally concerned with how religious people interpret and conceptualize sacred texts—both their own and those of other religious traditions. His first two books, The Formation of Islamic Hermeneutics and Islamic Legal Theory: A Critical Introduction, dealt with medieval theories of Islamic law and Qur’anic interpretation. He has been extending that project into the modern period, beginning in Indonesia where he spent the spring of 2013 as a Fulbright scholar. His other long–term projects are an epistemology and pedagogy of “sacrificial listening” and a series of studies on Muslim reception of the Bible, for which he has reconstructed and translated an eighth–century Muslim rewriting of the “Psalms of David.” These projects have led him to dabble as well in digital methods of data visualization and distant reading. He teaches upper-level courses on The Qur’an, Islamic Law, and Islamic Theology, as well as introductory and comparative courses in religious studies and the humanities more broadly. He maintains an up-to-date archive of his courses and scholarship on his personal web site at vishanoff.com.