Phd in CIVILIZATIONS OF ASIA AND AFRICA

email: leonardo.capezzone@uniroma1.it
phone:
building: Edificio Marco Polo, III piano
room: 318

Leonardo Capezzone (Rome, 1963) is Associate Professor at the Faculty of Humanistic Sciences, Sapienza-University of Rome, Department of Oriental Studies, where he has chosen to entitle his teaching History of Arab-Islamic Mediterranean.

In the same Department, which he pertains since 2005, he graduated under the guidance of prof. Biancamaria Scarcia Amoretti in 1991, and obtein his Ph.D. in Islamic Civilization - History and Philology in 1995. After obtaining a post-doctoral scholarship at the Orientale of Naples in Iranian Studies, he taught as an adjunct professor History of Arabic Literature at the University of Bologna, and Medieval Arabic Literature at the University of Trieste.

Even though as a historian of Arab-Islamic Middle Ages, the study of classical Arabic literature has always been an important side of his interests, and the literary dimension has in fact oriented its first researches on Shi'ism. The manifold expressions of political, religious and intellectual dissent in Islamic society between eighth and tenth centuries is another area of his research, which led him to approach, with the Ph.D. Thesis discussed in 1995, the heterodox hypothesis of the circle of alchemists concealed under the name of Jabir ibn Hayyan, based on a particular theory of knowledge and power.

Over the years, his interests to the intellectual history of the medieval Arab-Islamic world have been reinforced, recognizing in that peculiar period an experimental, pre-modern turning point for the birth of several questions – from philosophy to science – generally perceived by Western culture as distinctive of its own modernity.

This key to the understanding the medieval experience is clearly present in teaching, offering its students a comparative reading of Arab and Latin Middle Ages focused to the depth and relevance of the passages and transmission of knowledge (and methods of knowledge), and to the analysis of those aspects and features in the history of Arab-Islamic culture that might allow to rethink the periodization of world history, and to suggest a different mapping of the thought of modernity.