An Interview with Konrad Hirschler

Konrad Hirschler is a historian of manuscript cultures with a focus on Arabic North Africa and West Asia in the pre-print era. He combines social and cultural history to study what meanings different social strata and milieux ascribed to written artefacts and for what purposes they employed such artefacts. His work has focused in particular on reconstructing vanished libraries. This has led to a strong interest in the question of artefacts’ trajectories and provenances. In recent years, he has become increasingly interested in the materiality of the written word. As a result, he strives to develop cross-disciplinary initiatives among various disciplines in the humanities as well as between humanities and natural sciences.