Houari Touati, who is director of studies at EHESS, holds the Chair "Histoire and anthropologie des pratiques lettrées dans le monde musulman médiéval". He is also the director of the international journal Studia Islamica. He is notably the author of Islam et voyage en Islam :Histoire et anthropologie d'une pratique lettrée, Paris, Seuil, 2000 (Turkish translation 2006 and English 2010), and L'Armoire à sagesse : Bibliothèques et collections en Islam, Paris, Aubier / Flammarion, 2003 (Italian translation, 2006). Between 2010 and 2014, he directed a research program on human figuration which resulted in a collective work: De la figuration humaine au portrait dans l’art islamique, Leiden, EJ Brill, 2015. Currently, he is carrying out research on the concept of man in classical Islamic culture alongside an investigation of the mode of presence of Arab culture in the Italian Renaissance through the philological work of Leo Africanus which he has just edited and translated (into collaboration with Jean-Louis Déclais) his biographical collection titled De quelques Hommes illustres chez les Arabes et les Hébreux, Paris, Les Belles Lettres, 2020.