WHAT IS ARSHEEF?
ARSHEEF is a collaborative project that aims at promoting research in North Africa, the Middle East, the Caucasus, and South Asia.
Based on first-hand experiences of scholars and graduate students, ARSHEEF makes available up-to-date guides to libraries and archives across North Africa, the Middle East, the Caucasus, and South Asia.
We acknowledge that there might be financial, political, or personal circumstances that restrict travel for some, which is why ARSHEEF also endeavors to provide links to digital libraries and archives in and beyond North Africa, the Middle East, the Caucasus, and South Asia.
ARSHEEF is run by graduate students, edited by Athina Pfeiffer and Mathias Ghyoot, funded by the Department of Near Eastern Studies, and co-sponsored by the Humanities Council at Princeton University. To learn more about us, read below.
ATHINA PFEIFFER
Athina Pfeiffer is a PhD student in Near Eastern Studies at Princeton University. She works on law and justice in the medieval Islamicate world from a social historical viewpoint.
Her research focuses on everyday administration of justice, the relationship between the state and the law, and the way people related to institutions of justice and the law in Fatimid North Africa, including Egypt (tenth to twelfth centuries). She works on documents in addition to both published and unpublished long-form texts.
Athina is proficient in Arabic, Persian, and Judeo-Arabic.
She obtained a BA in History and an MA in Islamic Studies from Sorbonne University, Paris. She also holds a BA in Law from Panthéon-Assas University, Paris.
MATHIAS GHYOOT
Mathias Ghyoot is a PhD student in Near Eastern Studies at Princeton University. He studies the social and intellectual history of the modern Middle East and South Asia with a particular interest in the history of Islamism.
Mathias is the author of the forthcoming book Brothers Behind Bars: A History of the Muslim Brotherhood from the Palestine War to Egypt’s Prisons (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2025). Mathias is, moreover, working on an edition and translation – from Arabic into English – of the lost travelogue of Sayyid Qutb (d. 1966), tentatively titled The America I Saw: The Travel Writings of an Islamist in the Making.
Mathias obtained a M.A. in Islamic Studies with distinction from the University of Copenhagen in 2021 and received the Nordic Society for Middle Eastern Studies (NSMES) Award for Best M.A. Thesis in 2022. Mathias also holds a B.A. in Arabic and Religious Studies from the University of Copenhagen, and in 2018 completed the Center for Arab and Middle Eastern Studies (CAMES) Program at the American University of Beirut.
Mathias is proficient in Arabic (MSA and Egyptian/Levantine Colloquial) and Urdu/Hindi.