Naima AFIF is an international researcher in Oriental and Jewish Studies. She holds a PhD in Languages and Letters, and an MA in Oriental Philology and History from UCLouvain. Her doctoral thesis focused on the Qur’an in Hebrew during the Jewish Enlightenment in 19th-century Germany.
Her broader research explores the circulation of religious and scientific knowledge across the Eastern, Mediterranean, and European worlds in various languages (Ancient and Modern Hebrew, Classical and Modern Arabic, Classical Syriac, Classical and Biblical Greek, and Berber). Her work involves a range of computational tools and methods: analysis of multilingual corpora, natural language processing (NLP), TEI-XML encoding, and multispectral image-enhancement techniques.
She was a Scientific Collaborator at UCLouvain and a researcher at the University of Manchester, the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), and the University of Copenhagen. She devoted her recent research to Jewish engagement with the Qur’an in premodern Europe as part of the European Qur’an ERC Synergy grant project and led the development of international exhibitions in collaboration with research centres and cultural institutions. She co-edited the collective volume The European Qur’an (translated in France, Tunisia, and Türkiye) and is the author of The Jewish European Qur’an, forthcoming in the EuQu series published by De Gruyter.
With over a decade of experience in analyzing complex sources, project management, and science communication, she is currently developing public-engagement projects focused on promoting intercultural dialogue and counteracting polarization.