is a postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Institute of Iranian Studies at the Austrian Academy of Sciences

Shamil Shikhaliev, born in 1974 in the city of Buynaksk, Dagestan, studied Arabic and Islamic studies in Makhachkala. Between 2000 and 2020, he was employed at the Institute of History in Dagestan, Russia, where he held the position of senior researcher. From 2008 to 2018, he also served as the head of the Department of Islamic Manuscripts. In 2007, he defended his PhD dissertation, which focused on the Islamization of the Medieval Eastern Caucasus. From 2020 to 2023, he was a research associate on the ERC Starting Grant project “The Muslim Individual in Imperial and Soviet Russia”, based at the University of Amsterdam. He is currently working at the Institute of Iranian Studies on the research project “Probing the Horizons of a Daghestani Polymath: 'Alī al-Ghumūqī and His Library (1878–1943)”, funded by the Austrian Science Fund.