Petra Sijpesteijn is Professor of Arabic at Leiden University. She studied history, Arabic language and papyrology in Leiden, Cambridge, Cairo, Damascus and Princeton. Her work focuses on explaining how an Islamic empire developed from the great Arab conquests, building on, alongside and in reaction to existing structures and institutions. Drawing on the vast but as yet little-exploited corpus of documentary evidence in the form of coins, seals, inscriptions and, above all, papyri written in the various languages in use, she is particularly interested in the interplay between power-initiated policies and local participation in this formative process. She is currently the PI of a five-year project entitled " Land, Space, Power: Landscapes of the Early Islamic Empire ".
Petra is a corresponding member of the Académie des inscriptions et belles-lettres, the Austrian Academy of Sciences and the British Academy. She is also an elected scientific member of the Royal Dutch Society of Sciences. She has held visiting professorships at the American University in Cairo, University College London in Qatar, the École des hautes études en sciences sociales in Paris, the University of Tunis and the Bibliotheca Alexandrina.