Notes on Contributors
Jessalynn L. Bird
Associate Professor and Department Chair of Humanistic Studies at Saint Mary’s College, IN, and regional fellow of the Medieval Institute at the University of Notre Dame, is the author of many articles on the activities of Peter the Chanter’s circle, the crusades, and heresy. She studies the intersection of intellectual history with social, political, and religious history and most recently Mediterranean and environmental history. Her latest books include a collection of essays co-edited with Elizabeth Lapina, Crusades and Nature: Natural and Supernatural Environments in the Middle Ages (2024), and a monograph on crusade and reform in the circle of Peter the Chanter, forthcoming from Oxford University Press.
Lourdes Bonhome-Pulido
is Assistant Professor of Arabic and Islamic Studies at the University of Cordoba. She wrote her PhD on the Flood narrative in Syriac and Arabic sources. Her main fields of research are textual transmission between Christians and Muslims, Christian apocryphal literature, Arabic historiography, and hagiography and Arabic culture. Recent publications include “The Exile of Cain in the Kitāb al-ʿUnwān: An Ancient Tradition on the Melkite Literature” in Strangers in the Land. Traveling Texts, Imagined Others, and Captured Souls in Jewish, Christian, and Muslim Traditions in Late Antique and Mediaeval Times, ed. Miriam L. Hjälm and Marzena Zawanowska (Brill, 2024) and a co-edited volume (with Esperanza Macarena García García), De Qumrān al Qurʾān. Textos y grupos sectarios en el oriente próximo tardoantiguo (Sindéresis, 2022).
Thomas E. Burman
is Robert M. Conway Director of the Medieval Institute and Professor of History at the University of Notre Dame. He is a specialist in the intellectual history of Jewish–Christian–Muslim relations. His books include Religious Polemic and the Intellectual History of the Mozarabs, 1050–1200 (1994), Reading the Qur’an in Latin Christendom, 1140–1560 (2007), and, with Brian Catlos and Mark Meyerson, The Sea in the Middle: The Mediterranean World, 650–1650 (2022).
Ivana Čapeta Rakić
is an Associate Professor at the Department of Art History in Split. She specializes in visual phenomena from the late Middle Ages and early modern period, with a keen focus on iconographic themes. Lately, her research has delved deeply into the portrayal of “otherness” in visual art.
A.L. Castonguay
is Assistant Professor of Ancient, Medieval, and Islamic History at Western New England University, where her research and teaching explores the expression of political legitimacy, religious belief, group identity, and social networks in the Mediterranean basin. Her current research focuses on unearthing North African and Iberian social networks in medieval ṭabaqāt literature.
Eric Dursteler
is Professor of History at Brigham Young University. His publications include Venetians in Constantinople: Nation, Identity and Coexistence in the Early Modern Mediterranean (2006), Renegade Women: Gender, Identity and Boundaries in the Early Modern Mediterranean (2011), (with Monique O’Connell), The Mediterranean World: From the Fall of Rome to the Rise of Napoleon (2016), In the Sultan’s Realm: Two Venetian Ambassadorial Reports on the Early Modern Ottoman Empire (2018).
Yvonne Friedman
is Professor of General History and Land of Israel Studies at Bar-Ilan University (retired). Her research foci include interreligious contacts and 12th- and 13th-century Muslim–crusader peace processes in the Levant. Her book Encounter between Enemies: Captivity and Ransom in the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem (2002) treated medieval ransom in the Middle East, as did an edited volume, Religion and Peace: Historical Aspects (2018). She has written numerous articles on how to end holy war and different aspects of peacemaking in the Latin East. Her latest book is Interludes of Peace in the Medieval Latin East: Perceptions and Practices (Routledge, 2025).
Rita George-Tvrtković
is Dean and Professor of Theology at University of St Mary of the Lake in metropolitan Chicago where she specializes in historical Christian-Muslim relations. Her books include A Christian Pilgrim in Medieval Iraq: Riccoldo da Montecroce’s Encounter with Islam (2012), Nicholas of Cusa and Islam: Polemic and Dialogue in the Late Middle Ages (co-edited, 2014), and Christians, Muslims, and Mary: A History (2018). She is also a Consultor for the Vatican’s Dicastery for Interreligious Dialogue.
Nikolas Jaspert
is Professor of Medieval History at the University of Heidelberg (since 2013). His main areas of research are the history of the Mediterranean, particularly of the Iberian Peninsula in the Middle Ages; transcultural entanglements; history of religious orders and religious violence; and German–Iberian relations. His most recent work focuses on maritime and marine history.
Linda G. Jones
(Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona) specializes in the religious and cultural history of medieval al-Andalus and the Maghreb (12th to 15th centuries). Her research interests focus on textual representations of gender dynamics and masculinity in medieval Islam; (trans)cultural encounters between Islam and Christendom in the Iberian Peninsula and the Mediterranean reflected in Almohad, Nasrid, Mudejar, and Castilian texts; and medieval Islamic oratory and comparative medieval sermon studies. She has explored these topics as the Principal Investigator of two competitive research projects funded by the Spanish government and the European Union. Recent publications include articles in Speculum (2022) and al-Qantara (2024) and two co-edited volumes: Christian, Jewish, and Muslim Preaching in the Mediterranean and Europe: Identities and Interfaith Encounters (2019), and Saints and Sanctity in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam: Striving for Remembrance (2020).
Helena Kirchner
is Professor of Medieval History and Archaeology at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (Catalonia, Spain). Her areas of specialization are medieval rural history and archaeology and al-Andalus archaeology. She has conducted research projects in the Balearic Islands, Valencia, Andalucía, Catalonia, and Yemen. She is currently the director of Agrarian Medieval Archaeology Research Group (ARAEM, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona). She has studied field systems and settlement patterns and the impact of feudal conquests on these, particularly in al-Andalus, as well as studies of al-Andalus pottery. She is one of the Principal Investigators of the project entitled “Re-thinking the Green Revolution in the Medieval Western Mediterranean (6th–16th centuries)” (European Research Council). She is currently directing the excavations at Pla d’Almatà (Balaguer), a deserted Andalusian city abandoned at the time of the Christian conquest in the early 12th century.
Davide Scotto
teaches the history of Christianity at the University of Pavia, specializing in Christian understandings of Judaism and Islam in Europe and the Mediterranean. He previously worked as a researcher and lecturer at the University of Tübingen, the Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas of Madrid (ERC Project CORPI), the University of Basel, the Goethe University Frankfurt, and the University of Naples L’Orientale (ERC Project EuQu). Together with Alexander A. Dubrau and Ruggero Vimercati Sanseverino, he co-edited the collection of essays Transfer and Religion: Interactions between Judaism, Christianity, and Islam from the Middle Ages to the Twentieth Century (2020). He authored the recent monograph Juan de Segovia and the Qur’an: Converting the Muslims in Fifteenth-Century Europe (2024) and has co-edited with Kurt Villads Jensen Riccoldo da Monte di Croce (†1320): Missionary to the Near East and Expert on Islam (2024).
Uri Zvi Shachar
teaches in the Department of History at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, where he is also a member in the Center for the Study of Conversion and Inter-Religious Encounters. He specializes in the history of cultural exchange between Jews, Christians, and Muslims in the Late Middle Ages. His book, A Pious Belligerence: Dialogical Warfare and the Rhetoric of Righteousness in the Crusading Near East, was published by the University of Pennsylvania Press in 2021. In addition, the Autumn 2024 issue of Speculum included his essay entitled “Dukus Horant: The Codicology of a Mediterranean Epic.”
Ryan Szpiech
is Associate Professor of Spanish with appointments in the Departments of Romance Languages and Literatures, Middle East Studies, and Judaic Studies at the University of Michigan. He teaches courses in Spanish and English about religious history, culture, and literature in the Western Mediterranean (and the Iberian Peninsula in particular) in the Middle Ages and early modern period. In addition to publishing numerous articles and chapters on medieval religious debates, polemics, translation, and religious conversion, he is the author of Conversion and Narrative: Reading and Religious Authority in Medieval Polemic (2013) and editor of Medieval Exegesis and Religious Difference: Commentary, Conflict, and Community in the Premodern Mediterranean (2015). In 2019, he completed the documentary “The Birth of Spanish in 3D” (available in open access at
John V. Tolan
is a historian interested in the entangled lives of Jews, Christians, and Muslims in the Middle Ages and beyond. He has taught in universities in North America, Europe, Africa, and the Middle East; he is currently emeritus professor of History at the University of Nantes (France) and member of the Academia Europæa. He has received numerous prizes and distinctions, including two major grants from the European Research Council and a prize from the Académie Française. He writes in English, French, and Spanish, and his work has been translated into Italian, Turkish, Polish, Russian, Bosnian, Arabic, and Korean. He is the author of numerous articles and books, including Saracens (2002), Francis and the Sultan (2009), Faces of Muhammad (2019), Nouvelle histoire de l’islam, VIIe–XXIe siècles (2022), England’s Jews: Finance, Violence, and the Crown in the Thirteenth Century (2023), and Islam: A New History from Muhammad to the Present (2024). He is one of the four coordinators of the European Research Council programme “The European Qur’an” (2019–2025; euqu.eu).
David A. Wacks
is Professor of Spanish at the University of Oregon. He earned his PhD in Hispanic Languages and Literatures from the University of California Berkeley in 2003. In 2006, he was Harry Starr Fellow in Judaica at the Harvard Center for Jewish Studies. He is author of Framing Iberia: Frametales and Maqamat in Medieval Spain (2007), winner of the 2009 La corónica award for Double Diaspora in Sephardic Literature: Jewish Cultural Production before and after 1492 (2015), winner of the 2015 National Jewish Book Award in the category of Sephardic Culture, and author of Medieval Iberian Crusade Fiction and the Mediterranean World (2019). He blogs on his current research at http://davidwacks.uoregon.edu.
Anne Marie Wolf
is Professor of History at the University of Maine – Farmington. Her research interests focus on interfaith relations in medieval Iberia and the Mediterranean. She is the author of Juan de Segovia and the Fight for Peace: Christians and Muslims in the Fifteenth Century (2014), and Peace in the Middle Ages: Exploring Jewish, Christian, and Muslim Perspectives (2024).