Marcus Hibbeln’s work examines the historical formation and transformation of concepts through which Arab intellectuals understood changing social worlds. More broadly, his work explores the relationship between conceptual change, print culture, and the production of social knowledge in the modern Arab world.

Marcus received his MA from SOAS, University of London and his BA from Reed College. He is a research associate at Freie Universität Berlin’s Institut für Islamwissenschaft, and works with Prof. Dr. Florian Zemmin on the DFG-funded project “A Colonial Science Throughout? Sociology in Arabic Journals Between 1885–1952.”

As a conceptual and social historian, Marcus is particularly interested in how Arabic periodicals constituted social bodies, spaces, and problems through practices of translation, classification, and diagnosis. His dissertation explores the conditions of plausibility for sociology in Arabic intellectual worlds, and what forms of periodical life allowed social knowledge to develop before and alongside its academic institutionalisation. Here he explores the importance of periodicals through explicit references to ‘sociology’ (ʿilm al-iǧtimāʿ), recognised sociological thinkers, and debates over sociology as an autonomous science—as well as through wider, less formally disciplinary efforts to make society an object of explanation and intervention. It is here he argues that such formations were neither mutually exclusive nor arranged in a simple sequence. Periodicals allowed sociological knowledge to circulate before the discipline acquired institutional stability, and continued to mediate it after such boundaries had emerged. And it is here that we might explore how Arab writers selectively appropriated European references, combined them with Arabic and Islamic intellectual resources, and adapted them to local context. This project works to situate sociology within editorial networks, readership, reform debated, and changing classifications of society: within the very worlds which made such concepts meaningful.

First Supervisor @BGSMCS: Prof. Dr. Florian Zemmin