Notes on Contributors
Frédéric Bauden PhD (1996), is Professor of Arabic Language and Islamic Studies at Liège Université. His research focuses on Mamlūk historiography, diplomatics, and codicology. His publications cover the working methods of historians and the study of documents issued by the chancery as well as the manuals redacted by the secretaries.
Stuart J. Borsch earned his PhD (2002) at Columbia University in History and Medieval Islamic and Economic History. Since 2008, he has served as a professor in history at Assumption College in Worcester, Massachusetts. His research focus is on the Islamic economic history of Egypt and the second plague pandemic in Egypt. Borsch is the author of The Black Death in Egypt and England: A Comparative Study (2005) and has contributed to periodicals such as the Mamluk Studies Review and Comparative Studies in Society, Medieval Islamic Civilization: An Encyclopedia, and others.
Joseph Drory PhD (1984), is Emeritus Professor of Medieval Islamic History at Bar-Ilan University (Israel). His main areas of interest and research are Arabic geographers, the medieval history of Jerusalem, and Ayyubid and Mamluk politics. He is the author of many articles on these topics and the editor of Jerusalem under the Mamluks, (2012, in Hebrew).
Kurt Franz is a historian of the Islamic Middle East and serves as Professor of Islamic Studies at the University of Tübingen. His research focuses on the political and social history of the area to 1600, Arabic historical and geographical transmission, and the intertwining of spatial history and contemporaries’ spatial mindsets. He won his PhD at Hamburg with a thesis on compilation and intertextuality in Arabic chronicles. Having published widely on the relations between nomads and sedentary people, he among others authored a book on the history of the Syro-Mesopotamian Bedouin and coedited Nomad Military Power in Iran and Adjacent Areas. He more recently turned to exploring the use of historical geo-data, cartography, and Geographic Information Systems for the interdisciplinary study of the Middle East.
Yehoshua Frenkel earned his PhD at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He is a professor emeritus at the University of Haifa. His research interests embrace popular culture, communal practices, social history, and legal discourse in medieval and early modern Egypt and Syria (1100–1700). He has published extensively on Mamluk society and history. His numerous publications include the annotated and English translation of the anthology Ḍawʾ al-sārī li-maʿrifat ḫabar Tamīm al-Dārī (2014), The Turkic Peoples in Medieval Arabic Writings (Routledge: London, 2015), and many articles in journal and edited books.
Li Guo is Professor of Arabic at the University of Notre Dame in Indiana. He received his PhD in 1994 at Yale University. He has published monographs and articles on Mamluk historiography, Arabic documents, and Egyptian popular culture. He is the author of Early Mamlūk Syrian Historiography: Al-Yūnīnī’s Dhayl Mirʾāt al-zamān (Brill, 1998), Commerce, Culture, and Community in a Red Sea Port in the Thirteenth Century: The Arabic Documents of Quseir (Brill, 2004), and The Performing Arts in Medieval Islam: Shadow Play and Popular Poetry in Ibn Dāniyāl’s Mamlūk Cairo (Brill, 2012). Li Guo is a coeditor of Brill’s book series Studies on Performing Arts and Literature in the Islamicate World and has published many articles in journals and edited books.
Daisuke Igarashi earned his PhD in 2006 in History at Chuo University (Tokyo, Japan). He is a professor of Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies at Waseda University in Tokyo. He has published monographs and many articles on Mamluk political, social, and economic history, including Land Tenure, Fiscal Policy, and Imperial Power in Medieval Syro-Egypt (2015).
Yaacov Lev PhD (1978), University of Manchester, is Professor Emeritus of Medieval Islamic History in the Department Of Middle Eastern Studies at Bar-Ilan University, Israel. His work covers early Muslim, Ayyubid, and Mamluk Egypt. He is the author of State and Society in Fatimid Egypt (1991) and Saladin in Egypt (1999) and editor of Charity, Endowments, and Charitable Institutions in Medieval Islam (2005). He is working on a book about the administration of justice in medieval Egypt (seventh–twelfth centuries).
Amalia Levanoni (PhD, Hebrew University, 1990) is Professor Emerita of Medieval Islamic History at the Haifa University. She served as chair of the Department of Middle Eastern History at the University of Haifa from 2004–2007 and as president of the Middle East and Islamic Studies Association of Israel from 2014–2016. Her monographs include The Mamluk Ascendancy to Power in Egypt, A Turning Point in Mamluk History, The Third Reign of al-Nāṣir Muḥammad Ibn Qalāwūn (1310–1341) (Leiden, 1995). She has coedited The Mamluks in Egyptian and Syrian Politics and Society (Leiden, 2004). She has published entries in encyclopedias and articles and chapters in edited books and journals such as Studia Islamica, International Journal of Middle East Studies, Der Islam, Mamluk Studies Review, and Arabica. Her main area of research is the political and social history of the Mamluks in Egypt and Syria, 1250–1517.
Carl F. Petry is the Hamad ibn Khalifa Al Thani Professor of Middle East Studies, Department of History, Northwestern University. His research focuses on premodern Egypt, with emphasis on political economy. He has published: The Civilian Elite of Cairo in the Later Middle Ages (Princeton, 1982); Twilight of Majesty: The Reigns of the Mamluk Sultans al-Ashraf Qaytbay and Qansuh al-Ghawri in Egypt (U. Washington, 1993); Protectors or Praetorians? The Last Mamluk Sultans and Egypt’s Waning as a Great Power (SUNY, 1994); The Criminal Underworld in a Medieval Islamic Society: Narratives from Cairo under the Mamluks (Middle East Documentation Center, U. Chicago, 2012). He has edited and contributed to The Cambridge History of Egypt, vol. 1: Islamic Egypt, 640–1517 C.E. (Cambridge University Press, 1998). His teaching interests range from gender relations in the Islamic Middle Ages to Revolutionary Egypt under Nasser and Sadat.
Jo Van Steenbergen (PhD, 2003) is research professor of Arabic and Islamic Studies at Ghent University (Belgium). He engages with the social and cultural history of the premodern Islamic world, with a particular focus on the Islamic middle period (ca. 1000–1500), on Egypt and Syria, on the practices, discourses, and structures of power elites in the sultanate of Cairo (ca. 1200–1517), and on the de/construction of grand narratives in Mamluk/Islamic history. He was a research fellow of the Netherlands-Flemish Institute in Cairo (NVIC, 1997–1998, 2003), a research assistant at KULeuven (Belgium) and the Flemish Science Foundation (FWO) (1998–2003), a lecturer at the University of St Andrews (2004–2007), a senior research fellow at the Annemarie Schimmel Kolleg: History and Society during the Mamluk Era (1250–1517) (Bonn, 2014–2015), and a visiting lecturer/professor at the British Museum and at the School of Oriental and African Studies (London), at the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes (Paris), and at the National University of Malaysia. Between 2009 and 2014 he was principal investigator of the ERC Starting Grant Project “The Mamlukisation of the Mamluk Sultanate. Political Traditions and State Formation in 15th-century Egypt and Syria.” Jo Van Steenbergen is general editor of al-Masāq: The Journal of the Medieval Mediterranean (Routledge), member of the programming committee of the IMC (Leeds, UK), and editorial board member of Mamluk Studies (Bonn UP), The Medieval Mediterranean (Brill), and Annales Islamologiques (IFAO).
Koby Yosef is a lecturer in the Department of Arabic at the Bar-Ilan University (Israel). He earned his PhD the University of Tel-Aviv (2011). His research focuses mainly on changing patterns of social ties and political practices among the mamlūk elite during the Mamluk Sultanate. He has numerous publications on ethnicity, perceptions of ethnic identity, and master-slave relationships within the mamlūk society during the Mamluk Sultanate.