Rate My Professor Peter Pormann

Peter Pormann is Professor of Classics and Graeco-Arabic Studies at the University of Manchester, where he is affiliated with the Department of Classics, Ancient History and Egyptology in the School of Arts, Languages and Cultures, Faculty of Humanities. He studied Classics, French, and Islamic Studies at institutions including the Sorbonne in Paris, Hamburg, and Tübingen. Pormann holds an MA in Islamic Studies from the University of Leiden and an MPhil and DPhil in Classics from Corpus Christi College, University of Oxford. His research primarily concerns the transmission of the Greek medical and scientific heritage into the Islamic world, leveraging information technologies to aid its study. Specific interests include medicine and philosophy in late antique Alexandria, Greek-Syriac-Arabic translation technique, the history of mental illness, hospital provisions in tenth-century Baghdad, Arabic philosophy, and the reception of Graeco-Roman thought in the modern Middle East. Pormann investigates contacts between Muslims, Jews, and Christians writing in Greek, Latin, Syriac, Hebrew, and Arabic across centuries.

Pormann has an extensive publication record comprising 204 outputs, including 11 books, 78 scholarly editions, 61 articles, and 35 chapters in books. His works have garnered over 2,362 citations according to Google Scholar. Among the most influential are the co-authored "Medieval Islamic Medicine" (2007, with Emilie Savage-Smith; 773 citations), "The Philosophical Works of Al-Kindi" (2012, with Peter Adamson; 152 citations), "The Oriental Tradition of Paul of Aegina's Pragmateia" (2018; 131 citations), "Rufus of Ephesus: On Melancholy" (2008; 98 citations), and contributions to "The Cambridge Companion to Hippocrates" (2018; 56 citations). Recent publications include editions of Galen's "On Simple Drugs in Syriac Translation" (2025, with William Sellers, Siam Bhayro, Naima Afif, and Natalia Smelova) and forthcoming books like "What Classics Did for Islam" (2026). Through these works, Pormann has profoundly shaped the academic discourse on the interplay of classical and Islamic intellectual traditions.