Profile

Shahrzad Irannejad is a post-doctoral fellow at the newly-established Avicenna Study Center at RUB:AI, and its coordinator. She is a researcher in the history of medicine in the medieval Islamicate tradition with a special focus on Avicenna. In her PhD project “Localization of the Avicennan inner senses in the Galenic Brain” she investigated how, in an intersection of medicine and philosophy, concepts (of the brain and the soul) were transformed as they travelled beyond linguistic and cultural borders from the Greek tradition to the medieval Arabic tradition. In looking into the mechanics of textual transfer of knowledge in the medieval Islamicate world, she is also keen on engaging with the codicological aspects of the material media of knowledge transfer. She has published articles and book chapters on the history of concepts (of the soul and the body) and entanglements of medicine and cuisine.

Research Interests

History of humoral/temperamental medicine, Avicennan psychology, Galenic anatomy and physiology, metaphor theory, historical semantics, historical foodways

Publications

Irannejad SH, Alimi K. “Persian Cuisine and its Entanglements with Greco-Arabic Medicine”. In: ed. Zanotta, Repishti, Miola and Casucci, Entangled Food Histories: Methods and Sources for Exploring Foodways across Millennia, Alessandria: Edizioni dell’Orso, 2025.

Irannejad SH, Milenković A. “Of Organs, Functions and Body Concepts: Localisation in Empedocles and Nemesius”. In: Living Bodies, Dead Bodies and the Cosmos: Culturally Specific and Universal Concepts.  Chiara Ferella, Ulrike Steinert (eds.). Mohr Siebeck (Tübingen) in the series “Culture of Science and Knowledge”, 2024, 91-116

Irannejad SH. “The History of Medicinal Plants in Traditional Persian Medicine.” In Therapeutic Medicinal Plants in Traditional Persian Medicine, by Roja Rahimi and Roodabeh Bahramsoltani, 6–12, 1st ed. Boca Raton: CRC Press, 2024.

Irannejad SH, "Making Sense of Aristotle’s [Anonymous] Appearance in Avicenna’s Anatomy of the Brain”, AKAN BAND. (2019) 29: 123-140.

Select Presentations and Conference Papers

“Visual mouvance of the anatomical diagrams in Rhazes’s Kitāb al-Manṣūrī fi’ṭ-Ṭibb”, at the conference: Technical Knowledge in Human History: Text, Image and Re-creation, Pisa, 24.11.2025.

“Cardiocentrism and Encephalocentrism in Aristotle and Galen and their Reflection in Avicenna”, Meeting of the Avicennan Thought Working Group at The Iranian Academy of Medical Sciences, Tehran, 10.07.2024.

“Dissecting the tension between medicine and (natural) philosophy in Avicenna’s Canon of Medicine”, Cultures of Medieval Medicine in an Interdisciplinary Perspective, Bonn, 30.11.2023.

“Greco-Arabic Medicine in Classic Persian Cuisine”, Winter School: Entangled food histories - Mobility in food cultures from ancient history to contemporary times, Pavia, 15.12.2022.

“Brain Ventricles: from Text to Diagram (and back?)”, at the hybrid conference: The Medical Paratext, 08.10.2022, Glasgow/Online. 

“A Metaphor for Contagion in Qusṭā ibn Lūqā’s Book on Contagion”, 40th Annual Meeting of the Working Group “Marburger Gespräche zur Alten Heilkunde”, 18.06.2022, Marburg.

“Of Names, Descriptions and Labels: brain anatomy in the Greco-Arabic medical tradition”, Logos+ Colloquium, 22.04.2022, Lucerne/Online.

“Metaphors and the faculties of the soul: The Inner Senses in Dānešnāme-ye ʿAlāʾī”, hybrid conference Philosophical Anthropology in Ibn Sina”, Iranian Research Institute of Philosophy, 07.02.2022, Tehran/Online.

“Traditional (?) Iranian (?) Medicine: local responses to a global trend”, in panel Ties That (Un)Bind: The Performativity of Tradition in Knowledge Practices of “Connecting Themes Conference”, 17.08.2021, Berlin. 

"Contagion and Faith: between Prophetic Medicine and Science" online conference “Faith, Religion and Medicine“, September 2021, Leuven/online.

“Contagion Metaphor in Qusta bin Luqa”, Webinar “Science, Society and History in the Corona Pandemic”, History and Philosophy Group at the Research Center for Philosophy and History of Science, 19.07.2021, Tehran/Online.

“Avicenna’s Inner Senses and their Ventricular Localization in the summae” at the Third International Meeting of the Avicenna Study Group, 29.06.2021, Trier/Online.

“Bodiless Heads 2: bodies, borders, flux and fluidity” Lecture-Performance with Setareh Fatehi Irani, as part of the lecture series “Human, Medicine and Society: Past, Present and Future Encounters” at the Orient-Institut Istanbul, 22.01.2020, Istanbul, Turkey.

“From Localization of Functions to Embodiment of Concepts”, with Aleksandar Milenković, RTG1876 International Conference Concepts of Humans and Nature between Specificity and Universality, July 15-17, 2019, Mainz, Germany.

“Reception of Ancient Knowledge of the Brain in the Arabic Tradition” at the “Ancient Science Conference”, 12th to 15th of February 2018, London, The United Kingdom.

“Translation, Transmission, Transformation: Diachronic Development of Brain Anatomy in Greco-Arabic Medicine” at the Genealogies of Knowledge Conference “Translating Political and Scientific Thought across Time and Space”, 7-9 December 2017, Manchester, The United Kingdom.

"The Brain in Avicenna's Canon of Medicine" at the conference The Medieval Brain, March 9-11, 2017, University of York, York, The United Kingdom.

“Cuisine as a mirror for the state of medicine in Qajar Iran”. The 16th Conference of the International Qajar Studies Association: Doctors and the Medicinal Arts in Qajar Iran, August 8-9, 2016, Vienna, Austria.