Notes on Contributors
Reuven Amitai
(Ph.D., the Hebrew University of Jerusalem) is Eliyahu Elath Professor for the History of the Muslim Countries at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, specializing in the history of the pre-modern Middle East and nearby regions, with particular interest in the period of Mongol rule in southwestern Asia, the Mamluk Sultanate of Egypt and Syria, and medieval Palestine. Recently he co-edited with Stephan Conermann the volume The Mamluk Sultanate from the Perspective of Regional and World History: Economic, Social and Cultural Developments in an Era of Increasing International Interaction and Competition (V&R unipress and University of Bonn Press, 2019).
Naʿama O. Arom
(Ph.D., the Hebrew University of Jerusalem) wrote her dissertation “Beyond Bow Range – the Formation of Mongol Foreign Relations in the Middle East, 1253–1282,” in the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. The M.A. thesis was written in Bar-Ilan University, titled “The People of the Horse and the People of the Book – Medieval Mongol-Jewish Connections.” Arom is currently teaching history in Bar Ilan University, and military history in the Haganah Museum in Tel Aviv.
Christopher P. Atwood
(Ph.D., Indiana University) is Professor in the Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations at the University of Pennsylvania where he teaches the history of Mongolia and the Inner Asian borderlands of China. He has recently completed a critical edition with commentary of the Campaigns of Činggis Qan, a Mongolian text preserved in Chinese translation and Persian paraphrase, describing the early rise of the Mongol empire.
Dashdondog Bayarsaikhan
(D.Phil., Oxford), is a Professor at the National University of Mongolia and a Fulbright Visiting Scholar at Western Washington University. She is the author of The Essays on the Ilkhans: From Hülegü to Abu Saʿid (Ulaanbaatar, 2016), The Mongols and the Armenians (Leiden, 2011), and translator of Нум Сумтан Ард Түмний Түүх (The History of the Nation of Archers by Grigor Aknerc‘i) (Ulaanbaatar, 2010).
Pier Giorgio Borbone
(Ph.D., University of Torino) is Full Professor of Semitic language at the University of Pisa. He teaches Syriac and Hebrew at the University of Pisa. His research and publications cover various aspects of the history, language and culture of the Syriac Churches: codicology, epigraphy, relations with Central Asia and China, and the cultural exchanges between Europe and the Levant during the Renaissance.
Michael Hope
(Ph.D., Australian National University) is Assistant Professor of Asian History at Yonsei University. He has published on the political and social history of Iran, Iraq and the Mongol Empire with particular focus on the transmission of political authority in nomadic societies. His recent monograph was published in 2016 and was titled Power, Politics and Tradition in the Mongol Empire and the Ilkhanate of Iran.
Stefan Kamola
(Ph.D., University of Washington) studies the intellectual history of Iran during the Mongol period. His book, Making Mongol History: Rashid al-Din and the Jamiʿ al-Tawarikh (Edinburgh, 2019) examines the prolonged impact of one of the most important moments of cultural patronage in the medieval Islamic world through the manuscripts of the resulting work. His current work examines the intellectual life of Fars during the Mongol period to understand what was happening away from the central court. He is an Assistant Professor of History at Eastern Connecticut State University.
Judith Kolbas
(Ph.D., New York University). To understand Mamluk coinage, she discovered glass weights. Combining them with Il-Khānid coinage, she continues to explore monetary transactions in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. She worked with David Morgan in London, using his book to teach Mongol history in Ulaan Baatar in 1999. Later, as Vice President of the Royal Asiatic Society, she re-founded the China chapter in Shanghai before returning to the US in 2007. Then, she organized the Central Asian Numismatic Institute and became Adjunct Professor of History, Miami University.
Dmitry Korobeynikov
(aka Dimitri Korobeinikov) (Ph.D., Moscow, D.Phil., Oxford) is Associate Professor of Byzantine Studies at the University at Albany SUNY. His chief field of research is the relations between Byzantium and the empire’s eastern neighbors, from the eleventh through the fifteenth century. His book Byzantium and the Turks in the Thirteenth Century received the 2018 John Nicholas Brown Prize of the Medieval Academy of America. He is currently working on two projects: Byzantium and the Mongols, and the history of the Seljuk conquest of Asia Minor and the Caucasus in the eleventh century.
Koichi Matsuda
(D.Litt., Osaka University) is Emeritus Professor at Osaka International University. He is a researcher of the Mongol empire history and has been engaged in the investigation of the inscriptions of the Mongol era in Mongolia for the past 25 years. His main articles and publication are as follows; “The Eastern Domain of the House of Hülegü”, Tōyōshi kenkyū [The Journal of Oriental Studies], 39–1 (June 1980): 35–62; “On the Ho-nan Mongol Army,” Memoirs of the Research Department of the Toyo Bunko, 50 (1992), 29–54. Research on the Extant Inscriptions of the Mongol Empire and the Yuan Dynasty in Mongolia, edited with Ayudai Ochir, Osaka International University, 2013.
Timothy May
(Ph.D., University of Wisconsin-Madison) is Professor of Central Eurasian History at the University of North Georgia. He is the author of several books including The Mongol Art of War (2007, 2016), The Mongol Conquests in World History (2012), and The Mongol Empire (2018). His research focuses on the military history of the Mongol Empire. He also practices the Darks Arts of Administration as the Associate Dean of Arts & Letters. In 2014 he received UNG’s Alumni Distinguished Professor award.
A. C. S. Peacock
(Ph.D., University of Cambridge) is Professor of Middle Eastern and Islamic History at the University of St. Andrews. He was educated at the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge. His research focuses on the medieval and early modern history of the eastern Islamic world, and Islamic manuscripts. Major publications include The Great Seljuk Empire (Edinburgh University Press, 2015), Islam, Literature and Society in Mongol Anatolia (Cambridge University Press, 2019) and, as editor, Islamisation: Comparative Perspectives from History (Edinburgh University Press, 2017).
Yihao Qiu
(Ph.D., Fudan University) is currently an Associate Professor in the Department of History at the Fudan University (Shanghai). His main research themes are the history of the Yuan Dynasty, the Persian Chinggisid genealogies and the diplomatic relationship between the Yuan and other Chinggisid Khanates (Ilkhanate, Golden Horde, Chaghatay Khanate). His last publications include: Studies on the Political History of Yuan Dynasty and Culture Exchanges in Mongol Eurasia (Shanghai, 2019).
Kazuhiko Shiraiwa
is a lecturer at Toyo University, Tokyo. He studied at Keio University, Tokyo, and SOAS, London University under the tutelage of A. K. S. Lambton, V. L. Menage, T. Gandjei, Fujio Mitsuhashi and Tsutomu Sakamoto and is the author of a number of articles pertaining to the Ilkhanate.