Notes on Contributors
Rasmus Bech Olsen holds a MA in Arabic literature and a PhD in history from the University of London. During his doctoral studies he specialized in the history and historiography of 13th- and 14th-century Syria with a focus on urban politics and practices of protest. He has since worked with Arabic manuscripts from Ethiopia as a postdoc in the ERC-project Islamic Literature in the Horn of Africa (Islhornafr). He is currently employed as a curator of Islamic art at the David Collection in Copenhagen.
Víctor de Castro León (Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Department III) received his PhD in Arabic and Islamic Studies from the University of Salamanca in 2015. He is currently researcher in the Project “Mediterranean Nautical Cartography in Arabic and Ottoman Turkish: Islands or Gateways of Knowledge in the Sea of Transcultural and Translinguistic Translation Processes?” (PI S. Brentjes). He has also been a researcher in the project “Practicing Knowledge in Islamic Societies and their Neighbours” (funded by the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, PI M. Fierro, Anneliese Maier Award 2014) and a team member of the Research Project “Local Contexts and Global Dynamics: Al-Andalus and the Maghreb in the Islamic East” (FF12016-78878-R AEI / FEDER UE) at the CSIC, Spain. His research focuses on Andalusi historiography, the history of the Naṣrid kingdom of Granada (13th–15th centuries), and the intellectual production of the Islamic West. Among his recent publications is “Ibn al-Khaṭīb, official chronicler of the Naṣrid dynasty: Theory and political practice.”
Mohammad Gharaibeh is a professor of Islamic Intellectual History at the Institute for Islamic Theology of the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. Prior to this he was the coordinator of two international research projects, the Annemarie Schimmel Kolleg “History and Society of the Mamluk Period” and the Alexander von Humboldt Kolleg for “Islamicate Intellectual History” at the University of Bonn. His research focuses on Arabic historiography, hadith studies, and Islamic theology, as well as Islam and Muslims in European societies.
Kenneth A. Goudie received his PhD in 2016 from the University of St Andrews for a thesis entitled “The reinvention of jihād in twelfth-century al-Shām.” His research interests lie in the historiography of medieval Islam, particularly the formation and maintenance of group identities and the development of jihad ideology. His current research focuses on the historical writings of the fifteenth-century Quran exegete and historian Burhān al-Dīn al-Biqāʿī.
Christian Mauder (PhD 2017, University of Göttingen, Germany) is Associate Professor in the Study of Religions with specialization in Islam at the University of Bergen, Norway. Before coming to Bergen, he completed a membership in the School of Historical Studies at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, and a postdoctoral fellowship in the Department of Religious Studies at Yale University. In his research, he focuses on the Islamicate world in the late middle and early modern periods. His forthcoming monograph In the sultan’s salon: Learning, religion and rulership at the Mamluk court of Qāniṣawh al-Ghawrī (r. 1501–1516) constitutes the first in-depth analysis of an Egyptian court as a transregional center of intellectual, religious, and political culture at the turn from the late middle to the early modern period. It is based on his dissertation, which won the 2018 Malcom H. Kerr Dissertation Award (Humanities) of the Middle East Studies Association of North America and the 2018 Christian Gottlob Heyne Award of the University of Göttingen.
Evan Metzger is a PhD Candidate in Islamic Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles. His dissertation, entitled “Orphans, guardianship and legal interdiction: Legality and legal process in medieval Islam,” details the history of a specific, relatively unknown legal institution, the mawdaʿ al-ḥukm, which was developed by Muslim jurists between the late Fatimid and Mamluk periods in Egypt in order to supervise and invest the property of legal orphans and absent merchants.
Zacharie Mochtari de Pierrepont obtained his PhD at the University of Paris I Panthéon-Sorbonne (Paris), studying the history of Rasūlid Yemen (1229–1454) and the role of sacred and blessed lineages in Yemeni medieval history and historiography. His work as a postdoctoral research fellow at Ghent University is currently dedicated to the study of the famous jurist and scholar Ibn Hajar al-ʿAsqalānī (1372–1449), and particularly his main historiographical works, through an examination of their narratological structures and contextualization. Zacharie Mochtari de Pierrepont is a member of Humanistica, the French association for Digital Humanities, member of The Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations. He is also a member of the SEMOMM, the Society for the study of Middle-East and Muslim worlds.
Clément Onimus is Associate Professor at Paris 8 University (Vincennes—Saint Denis). He has defended a PhD at Ghent University and the École Pratique des Hautes Études on the conflicts between the amirs under Sultans Barqūq and Faraj, published under the title Les Maîtres du jeu (Paris, 2019). His research deals with the socioeconomic and political history of the Cairo Sultanate, including questions of wheat or money speculation as well as military careers, peace, and warfare among the amirs. He is now undertaking a deep study of the qāḍī Badr al-Dīn al-ʿAynī and 15th-century Egyptian historiography.
Tarek Sabraa is a scholar of the Islamicate world, mainly of the later middle and early modern periods with a focus on the Cairo Sultanate. He completed his PhD at Sapienza—Università di Roma, Italy in 2017. Besides his expertise in studying Arabic manuscripts, which led to a profound knowledge of the world of the Cairo Sultanate’s elites, he specializes in editing their so far unedited remains and providing them with contextualizing studies on authors and their oeuvre. Tarek Sabraa’s research interests comprise environmental history, biographical studies, the social history of al-Shām and Egypt, and intellectual history.
Iria Santás de Arcos (Ecclesiastical University San Dámaso, Madrid) received her PhD in Arabic and Islamic Studies from the University of Salamanca in 2014. She is currently Associate Professor of Arabic Language in the Ecclesiastical University San Dámaso, Madrid. She is also member of the Research Project “Local Contexts and Global Dynamics: Al-Andalus and the Maghreb in the Islamic East” (FF12016-78878-R AEI / FEDER UE) CSIC, Spain. Her research focuses on Andalusi adab, Christian Arabic literature, and the intellectual production of the early Islamic West. Among her recent publications is “Ibn ʿAbd Rabbihi. Legitimador de la dinastía omega? Cuestiones de poder en al-ʿIqd al-farīd” (2019).
Gowaart Van Den Bossche is a post-doctoral research fellow with the KITAB project at the Aga Khan University Institute for the Study of Muslim Civilisations. He obtained his PhD in history at Ghent University in January 2019 for a dissertation entitled “The past, panegyric, and the performance of penmanship: Sultanic biography and social practice in late medieval Egypt and Syria,” a detailed textual analysis and contextualization of six sultans’ biographies written by two Egyptian authors from the later 13th and early 14th century, Ibn ʿAbd al-Ẓāhir (d. 1293) and Shāfiʿ b. ʿAlī (d. 1330).
Jo Van Steenbergen (PhD 2003, KU Leuven, Belgium) is Professor of Arabic and Islamic Studies in the Department of Languages and Cultures and the Henri Pirenne Institute for Medieval Studies at Ghent University. His publications include: Order out of chaos. Patronage, conflict, and Mamluk socio-political culture. 741–784/1341–1382 (Brill, 2006); Caliphate and kingship in a fifteenth-century literary history of Muslim leadership and pilgrimage (Brill, 2016); Trajectories of state formation across fifteenth-century Islamic West-Asia (ed.) (Brill, 2020); A history of the Islamic world, 600–1800. Empire, dynastic formations, and heterogeneities in pre-modern Islamic West-Asia (Routledge, 2020); and various chapters and articles on late medieval Syro-Egyptian social and cultural history. He is supervisor and principal investigator of several research projects and digital initiatives related to the history of late medieval Egypt and Syria.
Koby Yosef (PhD 2011, Tel Aviv University) is a lecturer in the department of Arabic at the Bar-Ilan University. His research interests include the history and historiography of the Cairo Sultanate. Currently, he is working on a monograph on the transformation of the families of mamlūk amirs and sultans at the time of the Cairo Sultanate. He published several articles on social ties and ethnic identities of mamlūks, among them most recently “Usages of kinship terminology during the Mamluk Sultanate and the notion of the ‘Mamlūk family,’ ” in Y. Ben-Bassat (ed.), Developing perspectives in Mamluk history: Essays in honor of Amalia Levanoni, Leiden 2017, 16–75; and “Cross-boundary hatred: (Changing) attitudes towards Mongol and ‘Christian’ mamlūks in the Mamluk Sultanate,” in R. Amitai and S. Conermann (eds.), The Mamluk Sultanate from the perspective of regional and world history: Economic, social and cultural development in an era of increasing international interaction and competition, Goettingen and Bonn 2019, 149–214.