David Vishanoff
David Vishanoff is an Associate Professor in the Religious Studies Program at the University of Oklahoma, where he teaches courses on the Qur’an, Islamic law, Islamic theology, and comparative religion. He earned his Ph.D. in West and South Asian Religions, with a focus on Islamic thought, at Emory University, after completing an M.A. in Religious Studies at the University of Colorado and studying Islamic legal theory in Fez, Morocco. His research is principally concerned with how religious people interpret and conceptualize sacred texts—both their own and those of other religious traditions. His publications have dealt with Islamic thought, including the early history of Islamic legal theory (The Formation of Islamic Hermeneutics), and with interactions between religious communities, including Muslim rewritings of the Psalms of David. He is presently studying contemporary Qur’anic hermeneutics beginning with recent developments in Indonesia, where he spent the spring of 2013 as a Fulbright senior scholar. He is participating in a pilot project to develop "distant reading" software that will help him identify the most promising directions for this research by charting the relationships between various classical and contemporary hermeneutical discourses.
