Beatrice Gründler (or Gruendler; born 24 August 1964, in Offenburg) is a German Arabist and Professor of Arabic Language and Literature at Free University of Berlin and President of the American Oriental Society.
There she leads together with Dimitri Gutas, Professor of Graeco-Arabic Studies at Yale University and Einstein Visiting Fellow, the project Aristotle's Poetics in the West (of India) from Antiquity to the Renaissance.
A Multilingual Edition with Studies of the Cultural Contexts of the Syriac, Arabic, Hebrew, and Latin Translations Archived 2017-02-06 at the Wayback Machine funded by the Einstein Foundation.
Gründler is member of the Board of Directors of the Dahlem Humanities Center at Freie Universität Berlin.
All of these formed part of the Arabic-Islamic commonwealth.The German Research Foundation motivated the awarding of the Leibniz-Prize 2017 (the most important prize supporting research in Germany) to Gründler as follows:Beatrice Gründler receives the Leibniz-Prize for her studies of the polyphonic nature of Arabic poetry and culture.
Based on her research, she finally developed a complex history of the media of the Arab world, beginning with the introduction of paper and extending to book printing and beyond.
With her pilot project of a critical digital and commented edition of Kalila wa-Dimna, begun in 2015, Gründler is making accessible the genesis, textual history, and reception of one of the earliest Arabic prose texts and a central work of Arabic wisdom literature.