Olof Heilo

I was born in 1982 and grew up in Lund. During the years 2001-2005 I studied ancient Greek and Arabic in Lund and Farsi in Copenhagen as part of a common M. A. focusing upon shared cultural spaces and history of the Islamic and the Western world. I visited both Teheran and Cairo in 2005 as part of my language studies and wrote a paper on the Roman Empire in Islamic traditions at the Danish Institute in Damascus. I have also been a frequent visitor to the Swedish Research Institute in Istanbul, taking part in historical seminars in 2004 and 2008, holding one of the smaller scholarships in the winter of 2011, and being elected into its board of researchers in the fall of 2011. In 2010, I finished my PhD thesis Seeing Eye to Eye: Islamic Universalism in the Roman and Byzantine Worlds (7th-9th centuries) at the University of Vienna. My main field of research lies with the social reception of religious concepts and ideas, and the formative role of historical narratives upon larger religious identities.