Sona Grigoryan

 Sona Grigoryan is a researcher with a focus on the Arab and Muslim history of the Middle Ages. Her doctoral research at CEU explored notions of unbelief and freethinking in the writings of the eleventh-century Syrian poet Abū l-ʿAlāʾ al-Maʿarrī (d.1058). Her first MA research at the Yerevan State University dealt with modern Sunni fundamentalist thought, whereas her second MA research at CEU explored the anti-Christian polemics of the famous Muslim thinker Ibn Taymiyya (d.1328). Sona's broader fields of research interest are critique of religion, religious polemics, and Muslim-Christian relationships in the Middle Ages. She is the author of Neither Belief nor Unbelief: Intentional Ambivalence in al-Maʿarrī's Luzūm (De Gruyter, 2022). Sona teaches courses on Islam and Modernity, Arab Nationalism and other topics at the Department of Near Eastern Studies at the University of Vienna.