Muriel Debié

Muriel Debié was born in Pau on December 28, 1967. After studying at Henri-IV and then at the École normale supérieure, she pursued a path as an orientalist at the Catholic University of Paris and later at the Sorbonne (Paris IV), where she completed a thesis under the supervision of Bernard Flusin on Western Syriac historiography.^[1]

She teaches as a director of studies at the École pratique des hautes études (EPHE), where she holds the chair of Oriental Christianities.^[2] One of her research topics focuses on the complex relationships between Christians and Muslims in the early Muslim caliphates.^[3] Additionally, Muriel Debié contributed to France Culture, addressing topics related to her research, such as Ephrem the Syrian, the city of Antioch or the figure of Jacob of Serugh, among others.^[4][5][6][7]

She is generally regarded, along with her colleague Françoise Briquel-Chatonnet, as a significant Syriac scholar.^[8][9] The two researchers also collaborated within the framework of Les Belles Lettres, where they oversaw the publication of a new collection dedicated to Oriental Christianity.^[10][11] Their joint work, "Le monde syriaque" (The Syriac World), received a major award from the Institut du monde arabe in 2018^[12][13] and the medievalist prize la Dame à la licorne.^[14]

The following year, in 2019, Debié contributed to the writing of The Quran of Historians^[15][16][17] and later joined the Institut Universitaire de France as a senior member in 2020.^[18]

In November 2022, she was appointed a Knight of the Ordre national du Mérite for her academic research.^[19] For her book Alexandre le Grand en syriaque: Maître des lieux, des savoirs et des temps (Les Belles Lettres, 2024), Debié was a joint winner of the 2025 Podmore Book Prize for Late Antiquity, awarded by an independent international judging panel on behalf of the Virtual Centre for Late Antiquity.^[20]

• Knight of the Ordre national du Mérite