Notes on Contributors
Arezou Azad is Senior Research Fellow and Programme Director of the Invisible East programme at the University of Oxford. She is a historian of the medieval Islamic east (Iran, Afghanistan, Central Asia), with a DPhil from Oxford, and has published multiple books and peer-reviewed articles on the social and cultural history of the region.
Maaike van Berkel is Professor of Medieval History at the Radboud University Nijmegen. Her research focuses on administration, communication, and court and urban history in the medieval Middle East. Currently she is the principal investigator of a project on water management in Middle Eastern cities.
Niall Christie is an instructor in history at Langara College in Vancouver, Canada, where he teaches the history of Europe and the Muslim world. He is also an adjunct professor of medieval studies at the University of Victoria. His research focuses on the Muslim response to the Crusades.
Michael Cook has been teaching the history of the Muslim world in the Near Eastern Studies Department at Princeton University since 1986. Before that he taught in the History Department at the School of Oriental and African Studies in the University of London. His latest book is Ancient religions, modern politics.
Nadia Maria El Cheikh is a scholar of the Abbasid Caliphate and Byzantium. Her publications include Byzantium viewed by the Arabs (Harvard Middle Eastern monographs, 2004), which was translated into Turkish and Greek. In 2013 she coauthored a book entitled Crisis and continuity at the Abbasid court: Formal and informal politics in the caliphate of al-Muqtadir (295–320/908–932) (Brill). Women, Islam and Abbasid identity was published in 2015 by Harvard University Press and was recently translated into Arabic. She served as Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at the American University in Beirut between 2016 and 2021. In 2022 she was appointed Vice Provost for Cultural and Research Engagement at NYU Abu Dhabi.
Corisande Fenwick is Associate Professor in Mediterranean Archaeology at the Institute of Archaeology, UCL and Director of the Society for Libyan Studies. Her recent books include Early Islamic North Africa (Bloomsbury, 2020) and the co-edited Oxford handbook of Islamic archaeology (OUP, 2020). She currently directs excavations in Morocco and Tunisia.
Pejman Firoozbakhsh is a philologist of Iranian languages, focusing on the formation and development of New Persian. His research interests include the New Iranian languages and dialects, Persian codicology, historiography, and textual criticism. Pejman graduated from the University of Hamburg with a PhD in Iranian Studies in 2020.
Allen Fromherz is Professor of History and Middle East Studies Center Director at Georgia State University. He authored The Almohads: Rise of an Islamic empire; Ibn Khaldun, life and times; The Near West: Medieval North Africa, Latin Europe and the Mediterranean and Qatar, a modern history; and edited The Gulf in world history and Sultan Qaboos and Modern Oman. He is a Senior Fulbright Scholar to Spain (2022).
Geert Jan van Gelder (b. Amsterdam, 1947) was Lecturer in Arabic at the University of Groningen from 1975 until 1998 and Laudian Professor of Arabic at the University of Oxford from 1998 until 2012. He has published widely on classical Arabic literature.
Tim Greenwood is a Reader in the School of History at the University of St Andrews. He has published widely on the political, social, and cultural history of late antique and medieval Armenia (c. 500–1100). He is preparing a monograph on law and legal culture in medieval Armenia.
John Haldon studied in Birmingham, Athens, and Munich. He is a Fellow of the British Academy and current Director of the Princeton Climate Change and History Research Initiative. His research focuses on the history of the medieval eastern Roman (Byzantine) Empire, on state systems and resources in the premodern world, and on the impact of environmental stress on premodern societies.
Carole Hillenbrand CBE, FBA (Professor Emerita, Edinburgh; Honorary Professor, St Andrews) has published seven books plus three volumes of collected articles. She was awarded the King Faisal Prize in Islamic Studies for The Crusades: Islamic perspectives (1999), and the British Academy Nayef Al-Rodhan Prize for Global cultural understanding for Islam: A historical introduction (2016).
Robert Hillenbrand FBA, Professor of Islamic Art at Edinburgh and St Andrews, has published 11 books; some 200 articles; and edited, co-edited, or coauthored 14 books. He has held visiting professorships at Cambridge, Princeton, UCLA, Bamberg, Dartmouth College, Leiden, New York, Cairo, and Groningen. He works on Islamic architecture, book painting, and iconography.
Robert Hoyland is Professor of Middle East History at New York University’s Institute for the Study of the Ancient World, having previously taught at the universities of St Andrews and Oxford. He has published on diverse aspects of the intellectual and material culture of the late antique and early Islamic Middle East.
R. Stephen Humphreys is Professor Emeritus in History and Islamic Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He is the author of From Saladin to the Mongols: The Ayyubids of Damascus, 1193–1260 (1977), Islamic history: A framework for inquiry (1991), and Muʿawiya ibn Abi Sufyan: From Arabia to empire (2006). He has been a visiting member of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, NJ and a visiting fellow at All Souls College, Oxford.
Robert Irwin lectured in the Mediaeval Department of the University of St Andrews before leaving to become a full-time writer of fiction and nonfiction. He has published books on the Arabian nights, the Mamluks, and Orientalism. His most recent work of nonfiction is Ibn Khaldun: An intellectual biography.
Richard Kimber was formerly Lecturer in Arabic Studies at the University of St Andrews.
Balázs Major is an archaeologist, Arabist, and historian and holds a PhD in archaeology from Cardiff University. He is Director of the Institute of Archaeology at Pázmány Péter Catholic University. He is directing archaeological excavations in Syria, Lebanon, and Iraqi Kurdistan, with a main interest in medieval military architecture and rural settlements.
Andrew Marsham is Professor of Classical Arabic Studies at the University of Cambridge and a Fellow of Queens’ College. His publications include Rituals of Islamic monarchy (Edinburgh, 2009) and two edited volumes: Power, patronage, and memory in early Islam (Oxford, 2018), with Professor Alain George, and The Umayyad world (Routledge, 2021).
Harry Munt is Senior Lecturer in Medieval History at the University of York. He is the author of several articles on early Islamic history and premodern Arabic history writing as well as The Holy City of Medina: Sacred space in early Islamic Arabia (Cambridge University Press, 2014).
Alan V. Murray is Senior Lecturer in Medieval Studies at the University of Leeds. He wrote his doctoral thesis on the nobility of the kingdom of Jerusalem under the supervision of Hugh Kennedy and has published numerous works on the crusades, the principalities of Outremer, and medieval warfare, including The Crusader kingdom of Jerusalem: A dynastic history, 1099–1125 (2000), The Franks in Outremer: Studies in the Latin principalities of Syria and Palestine, 1099–1187 (2015), and Baldwin of Bourcq: Count of Edessa and King of Jerusalem (1100–1131) (2022).
Alastair Northedge is Professor Emeritus of Islamic Art and Archaeology at Université de Paris 1 (Panthéon-Sorbonne). He has worked in Syria, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Kazakhstan, and Turkmenistan, and conducted projects at Amman in Jordan, and Ana in Iraq, in addition to Samarra. He is author of Studies on Roman and Islamic Amman, joint author of Excavations at Ana, and published the Historical topography of Samarra in 2005. The second volume of the project at Samarra, the Archaeological atlas of Samarra, was published in 2015. He subsequently worked on the medieval city of Dehistan in Turkmenistan. After retirement in 2017, he is now working on the archaeological site of Old Basra at al-Zubayr in Iraq.
Letizia Osti is Associate Professor of Arabic Language and Literature at the University of Milan. She has published on classical Arabic prose and narrative techniques in biographical collections, historiography, literature, and intersections thereof. She is the author of History and memory in the Abbasid caliphate: writing the past in medieval Arabic literature (Bloomsbury, 2022).
Wen-chin Ouyang is Professor of Arabic and Comparative Literature at SOAS, University of London. She has published extensively on classical and modern Arabic literature and critical theory, including The thousand and one nights.
Arietta Papaconstantinou is a social historian of the late antique Mediterranean, focusing on the transition from the Roman to the Islamic empire. She researches rural communities and historical multilingualism and Mediterranean cultural history as a whole. She teaches late antique history at the University of Reading and is an associate member of the Faculty of Oriental Studies in Oxford and of the Institute for Byzantine Studies at the Collège de France.
Andrew Petersen is Director of Research in Islamic Archaeology at the University of Wales Trinity Saint David. He studied medieval history at St Andrews, Islamic Architecture at Oxford, and wrote his PhD on medieval and Ottoman Palestine at Cardiff University. He is a Member of the Institute for Archaeologists and a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society.
Sarah Bowen Savant is Professor of History at the Aga Khan University—Institute for the Study of Muslim Civilisations (AKU-ISMC) and the principal investigator of the European Research Council—funded KITAB project (
Petra M. Sijpesteijn is Professor of Arabic at Leiden University. She is a cultural and social historian of the medieval Middle East. Currently she is the principal investigator of a European Research Council funded project entitled Embedding conquest: Naturalising Muslim rule in the early Islamic empire (600–1000).
Angus D. Stewart studied with Hugh Kennedy at the University of St Andrews. He is the author of The Armenian kingdom and the Mamluks: War and diplomacy during the reigns of Het‘um II (1289–1307) (Leiden, 2001). Now lecturing in Mediaeval and Middle Eastern History at St Andrews, he has inherited Hugh’s former module on “The Mediaeval castle.”
Cristina Tonghini is an archaeologist who specializes in the Arab world in the Islamic period. She is Full Professor at the Ca’ Foscari University of Venice. Her current research focuses on settlement, landscape, resources management, and production in northern Iraq. Recent publications include From Edessa to Urfa: The fortification of the citadel (Archaeopress 2021).
Jo Van Steenbergen is Professor of Arabic and Islamic Studies at Ghent University. He has published many chapters, articles, edited volumes, and books, especially on late medieval Syro-Egyptian history, including A history of the Islamic world, 600–1800 (2021).
Peter Webb is a University Lecturer in Arabic Literature and Culture at Leiden University. His research analyzes the evolution of Arab identity and Muslim interpretations of pre-Islamic history. He is author of Imagining the Arabs: Arab identity and the rise of Islam (Edinburgh, 2016) and editor/translator of several classical Arabic texts for NYP Press’s Library of Arabic Literature and Brill’s Bibliotheca Maqriziana.
Chris Wickham is Chichele Professor of Medieval History (Emeritus) at the University of Oxford and taught at both Oxford and Birmingham. He has published widely on European and Eurasian history across the period 400–1200.