Dr Peter Webb

Peter is University Lecturer in Arabic Literature and Culture at Leiden University, where he leads a European Research Council project (2026–2031) tracing pre-Islamic Arabia through poetry and fieldwork in Saudi Arabia. His travels have taken him from Damascus and Isfahan to a fellowship at Berlin's Museum of Islamic Art, where he studied Arabic calligraphy among the monuments of medieval Egypt and Uzbekistan, and to Oman, tracking shrines to ancient Arabian prophets. He is the author of Imagining the Arabs (2016) and The Arab Thieves (2019).