Nathan Gibson

Nathan Gibson is Professor of Religious Studies with an emphasis on Jewish-Islamic Relations at the Goethe University Frankfurt, and co-directs the Biblia Arabica project with Ronny Vollandt. His research focuses on interreligious interaction among 9th-13th century Arabic-speaking communities, including knowledge exchange and polemical argumentation.

Since 2026 he also directs the subproject “Neighborhood Bibles: The Dissemination of the Tanakh/OT Text among Muslim Authors” in the LOEWE-Center Dynamics of Religion. Previously, he was a postdoc at Vanderbilt University in the Syriaca.org project and a Research Associate in the DFG-DIP Biblia Arabica project, in which he assisted with the creation of the Bibliography of the Arabic Bible: A Classified and Annotated History of Scholarship. From 2018 until 2023, he conducted projects funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) on interreligious networks in the biographical history of physicians by Ibn Abī Uṣaybiʿa (13th cent.).

He holds an MA (2011) and PhD (2015) in Semitic and Egyptian Languages and Literatures with an emphasis in Arabic and Syriac from the Catholic University of America. His PhD dissertation, supervised by Sidney Griffith, explored the situation of Muslim-Christian relations in ninth-century Iraq through the lens of “The Refutation of Christians,” a polemical work by the Arabic prose master Amr ibn Bahr al-Jahiz (c. 776–868/869).

For more information, see his page at Goethe University and his personal website (npgibson.com).