Insatiable Appetite: Food as Cultural Signifier in the Middle East and Beyond

Kirill Dmitriev is lecturer in Arabic at the University of St Andrews, UK. His primary research focuses on the study of classical Arabic language and literature, the religious history of the Arab world, and comparative literature. He is the author of _Das poetische Werk des Abū Sahr al-Hudalī, Eine literatur-anthropologische Studie_ (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2008), co-editor of the volume_Religious Culture in Late Antique Arabia, Selected Studies on the Late Antique Religious Mind_(Piscataway, NJ: Gorgias Press, _Islamic history and thought_ 6, 2017), and convener of the collaborative research initiative _Khamriyya as a World Poetic Genre: Comparative Perspectives on Wine Poetry in Near and Middle Eastern Literatures_. Julia Hauser is assistant professor of global history and the history of globalization processes at the University of Kassel. She is currently working on an entangled history of vegetarianism. Her work has been supported by grants from the German Research Association, the Gerda Henkel Foundation, the Fritz Thyssen Foundation, the Deutsche Morgenländische Gemeinschaft, and the Max Weber Foundation. She is the author of _German Religious Women in Late Ottoman Beirut: Competing Missions_, Leiden; Boston: Brill, 2015, and co-editor, with Christine Lindner and Esther Möller, of _Entangled Education: Foreign and Local Schools in Ottoman Syria and Mandate Lebanon (19th-20th centuries)_, Würzburg: Ergon, 2016. Julia Hauser is a member of the Arab-German Young Academy of Sciences and Humanities (AGYA). Bilal Orfali is associate professor of Arabic Studies at the American University of Beirut. He specializes in Arabic literature, Sufism, and Qurʾanic Studies. He co-edits _al-Abhath Journal_, and Brill’s book series _Texts and Studies on the Qurʾan_. He is the author and editor of more than twenty books on a broad range of subjects relevant to Arabic and Islamic Studies.