The Faculty of Oriental Studies' staff and students are involved in a wide range of research projects, leading the world in the study of the languages and culture of the Middle East, Inner and South Asia, and East Asia. Details of DPhil student research interests is available on the Student Research page, or on request from the Faculty Office by emailing orient@orinst.ox.ac.uk.

Thinking of applying for a research grant? Please refer to the faculty flowchart here and the Humanities Division website here. Please also see section six of the Oriental Studies Academic Staff Handbook.

For information about applying for research support funding from the Faculty of Oriental Studies, see the research support funding page.

Research Centres in the Faculty of Oriental Studies

• Research Centre for Japanese Language and Linguistics
• Khalili Research Centre for the Art & Material Culture of the Middle East
• The Oxford Centre for Byzantine Research

Institutes and Research Projects

• Institute for Chinese Studies
• Griffith Institute
• Online Egypgtological Bibliography
• Electronic Text Corpus of Sumerian Literature

Below are some details of a handful of the key research projects currently taking place within the Faculty.

Balkh Art and Cultural Heritage Project

Oxford University launches the ‘Balkh Art and Cultural Heritage Project,’ funded by the Leverhulme Trust. The project has a dual aim of undertaking new research on Afghanistan’s early Islamic history, and in building the capacity of Afghan colleagues in cultural heritage research. For three years, from September 2011 to September 2014, a team of scholars in the UK and abroad will be studying the textual and material culture of Balkh in northern Afghanistan. Historical Balkh (near modern-day Mazar-i Sharif) was one of the oldest, largest and most important cities of Afghanistan until late medieval times. The study opens up exciting new areas of knowledge on Afghanistan’s pre-Islamic past, and the way in which Islam was incorporated into historical memory. The project is led by Professor Edmund Herzig, and includes a team of experts with specialist knowledge on Afghan archaeology, coins, ceramics, and Persian and Arabic texts. The project partners with several research and cultural heritage organisations in Afghanistan, including the Ministry of Information and Culture, the Kabul National Museum and the French Archaeological Delegation in Afghanistan (DAFA).

IMPAcT - From Late Medieval to Early Modern: 13th to 16th Century Islamic Philosophy And Theology

Dr Judith Pfeiffer has been awarded a five-year European Research Council grant to support frontier research for a project entitled 'IMPAcT - From Late Medieval to Early Modern: 13th to 16th Century Islamic Philosophy And Theology’.  IMPAcT will make accessible the crucially important, but much neglected 13th–16th century history of thought of the Nile-to-Oxus region on a broad scale by establishing, through an integrated database on Islamic philosophy, theology, and adjacent fields, the bio-bibliographical data necessary for systematic research in these areas.  IMPAcT’s ultimate aim is to bridge the gap between the much better studied classical and modern periods of Islamic intellectual history, and to enable scholars to study the intellectual and political history of the period in a holistic approach – all too often the two are perceived and hence studied as two separate fields.  IMPAcT’s objective is to overcome the current fragmentation of the existing expertise across Europe, the Middle East, and North America by collaborating with international projects in related fields, through bringing together experts in these fields at international workshops and conferences, and by encouraging especially the younger generation to engage in research on pertinent topics through travel bursaries for graduate students and by establishing post-doctoral research positions of an exceptional length, enabling researchers to devote themselves to the in-depth study of a specific topic for an extended period of time, without the distractions of teaching and administration.  IMPAcT’s aims will be further supported through the edition and translation of key texts, the publication of monographs, and the support of graduate students and postdoctoral researchers through research fellowships and association with the project, permitting them to carry out their research in a congenial and pertinent research environment.

Main project site

Leverhulme Project on Toleration of Variant Practice and Theology within Judaism since 200 BCE

The project aims to investigate the evidence for tolerance of variant theology and practice within Judaism from the completion of the Hebrew Bible to the present, and to look for explanations of such tolerance (where it can be found) in the context of developments within Judaism; the social, cultural and economic status of the Jews affected within the wider society in which they lived; the religious, cultural and political assumptions of that wider society; and the personal predelictions and affections of the leading actors in the case studies investigated. Evidence for variety within Judaism is considerable, from the Samaritan schism and the varied groups of the Late Second temple era to the tannaitic notion of heresy, the Karaites, distinctive regional forms of rabbinic Judaism in medieval Europe, the followers of Shabbetai Zvi, the Hasidic communities of the early modern period, and the varieties of Judaism which have flourished since the Enlightenment. The aim of the project is to find out how Jews of these different religious persuasions have in practice behaved. How much have they argued with or attempted to discipline each other? How much have they simply ignored each other? And why did they choose to adopt the approach to their opponents that they did? The project is intended to provide answers to these questions by providing material, in the form of case studies, to inform a new narrative history which will explore how different expressions of Judaism related to each other not just through conflict but as part of a single religious system. The case studies themselves will be published with full supporting documentation. The narrative history will use the case studies alongside accounts of dissent and antagonism, in order to provide a paradigm for writing the history of Judaism which takes account of such cases of tolerance of variety.

Main project page

Verb semantics and argument realization in pre-modern Japanese:
A comprehensive study of the basic syntax of pre-modern Japanese.

This project investigates verb semantics and argument realization through pre-modern Japanese, from the beginning of the recorded history of Japanese in the 8th century until the end of the 16th century. Argument realization is a fundamentally important aspect of the syntax of a language as it concerns the way in which verb meaning determines the number of arguments and their morpho-syntactic and semantic properties. The project has a synchronic and a diachronic part, each with theoretical, descriptive, and practical implications of relevance to Japanese studies generally, Japanese linguistics, and historical and general linguistic theory.

The initial phase of the project consists of building an extensive electronic database of representative texts from all periods of pre-modern Japanese which will form the basis for the descriptive and analytical work of the project. More information about the project can be found on the project website.

The project is funded by a generous grant of almost £1 million from the Arts and Humanities Research Council which has enabled us to set up a dedicated research team of both internal and external members. The project is hosted by the Research Centre for Japanese Language and Linguistics.

The Book of Curiosities Project

In June 2002, the Bodleian Library acquired a unique manuscript of a hitherto unknown Arabic cosmographical treatise, the Kitab Ghara’ib al-funun wa-mulah al-‘uyun, loosely translated as The Book of Curiosities of the Sciences and Marvels for the Eyes. The manuscript is a copy, probably made in Egypt in the late 12th or early 13th century, of an anonymous work compiled in Egypt between 1020 and 1050. It is extraordinarily important for the history of science, especially for astronomy and cartography, and contains an unparalleled series of diagrams of the heavens and maps of the earth.

The acquisition of the Book of Curiosities was made possible by donations from the Heritage Lottery Fund, the National Arts Collections Fund, the Friends of the Bodleian Library, ARAMCO (Saudi Arabia), and several Oxford colleges as well as some individual donors. These donations also provided funds for the conservation, pigment analysis, and digitisation of the manuscript; the exhibition of the manuscript for the general public; the preparation of a school teacher’s pack based on portions of the manuscript; and the creation of website dedicated to its full publication. The project (now partially funded as well by the AHRC) to fully edit, translate, and analyse the manuscript is being conducted by Prof. Emilie Savage-Smith and Dr. Yossef Rapoport, with the collaboration of Prof. Jeremy Johns. The newly established Khalili Research Centre for the Art & Material Culture of the Middle East has provided a home for the execution of the project.

This map of the inhabited world is unlike any other recorded ancient or medieval map. At the top of the map, which is labelled South, there is a carefully executed graphic scale. The ‘Mountain of the Moon’—considered by medieval Arabic writers to be the source of the Nile—is represented at the centre of the scale. In the lower right part of the map is Europe, with the right half dominated by an extremely large Iberian peninsula. In the upper left of the map, the Indian Ocean is shown together with Arabia (the larger of the two peninsulas) and Persia/India. The two highly stylized and complicated river systems between and below the two peninsulas represent the Euphrates and the Tigris. In the lower left of the map, we find the gate constructed by Alexander the Great to enclose Gog and Magog.