Notes on Contributors
Arezou Azad Arezou Azad is Lecturer in Medieval History at the University of Birmingham. She is a historian of medieval Central Asia, Afghanistan and Iran, exploring the ways in which the arrival of Islam impacted the urban, social and religious fabric. She is concerned by the ways in which histories of Islam, Buddhism, and nationality are relevant to contemporary debates on issues as diverse as Islamic militancy, jihadism and women’s rights. She is the author of Sacred Landscape in Medieval Afghanistan (Oxford University Press, 2014).
Sobhi Bouderbala Sobhi Bouderbala is Assistant Professor of Islamic History at the University of Tunis, and member of the Laboratoire d’ Histoire des Économies et des Sociétés Méditerranéennes. He is working on the social and adminstrative history of early Islam, especially in Egypt; and on the edition of the Arabic papyri of Fustat.
Michele Campopiano Michele Campopiano is Senior Lecturer (Associate Professor) at the Centre for Medieval Studies of the University of York. He has worked on history and geography in the Middle Ages, on cross-Mediterranean cultural contacts and on the economic, social and cultural consequences of the early Islamic conquests.
Alain Delattre Alain Delattre, Ph.D. (2004), is Professor of Greek language and papyrology at the Université libre de Bruxelles and teaches Coptic papyrology at the École pratique des hautes études in Paris. He has published monographs and articles on Greek and Coptic papyri and inscriptions.
Jessica L. Ehinger Jessica Ehinger, Ph.D., completed her doctorate in Theology at the University of Oxford in 2016. Her research focuses on the developing religious identities among Christian and Muslim communities in the early Islamic community. She currently publishes as an independent scholar, and in addition to her academic research, serves as a contributing author for Chronicle of Higher Education’s Vitae and The Huffington Post.
James Howard-Johnston James Howard-Johnston is Associate Professor of Byzantine Studies at the University of Oxford. He specializes in the history of Byzantium 500–1100 CE. He is the author of Witnesses to a World Crisis (Oxford University Press, 2010), Historical Writing in Byzantium (Heidelberg, 2014) and The Last Great War of Antiquity (forthcoming).
Elif Keser-Kayaalp Elif Keser-Kayaalp, is an Associate Professor in Museum Studies at Dokuz Eylül University in İzmir, Turkey. She completed her doctorate in the University of Oxford in 2009 with a thesis entitled “Church Architecture of Northern Mesopotamia, AD 300–800.” While her focus remained mainly in Late Antique Mesopotamia, she has also published on artistic encounters in medieval Jazira and the current situation of Syriac churches in the light of heritage studies.
Hugh Kennedy Hugh Kennedy is Professor of Arabic at the School of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London. Hugh Kennedy studied at Cambridge and lectured in Islamic History at the University of St. Andrews from 1972 to 2007. He is the author of numerous books on early Islamic history, including The Prophet and the Age of the Caliphate (2nd ed. Routledge, 2004), The Courts of the Caliphs (Phoenix, 2004), The Great Arab Conquests (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2007) and The Caliphate (Penguin, 2016).
Marie Legendre Marie Legendre is Lecturer in Islamic history at the University of Edinburgh. Her work focuses on early Islamic social and economic history (600–1200). She has published on the transformation of Byzantine administrative structures in the early Islamic period and edited Arabic and Coptic documents from early Islamic Egypt. Her projects include a reconstruction of Abbasid fiscal practice based on documents preserved in the Egyptian countryside in Greek, Coptic and Arabic.
Javier Martínez Jiménez Javier Martínez Jiménez, Ph.D. (2014), University of Oxford, is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Faculty of Classics at the University of Cambridge, member of the ‘Impact of the Ancient City’ ERC-funded project, and a Postdoctoral By-Fellow at Churchull College. He received his doctorate in archaeology, researching on the continuity of aqueducts in Visigothic and early Islamic Spain. He has been in charge of the survey and excavation of the aqueduct of Reccopolis in Spain and the excavation of the late antique complex at Casa Herrera (Mérida). His publications include papers on urbanism in post-Roman Spain, Ostrogothic fortifications, and the continuity and role of aqueducts in the post-Roman period.
Harry Munt Harry Munt is Lecturer in Medieval History at the University of York. His research and teaching focuses on the history of the Islamic world, ca. 600–1500. In particular, he works on the history of the Arabian Peninsula in the early Islamic centuries, Islamic holy cities and pilgrimage, and Arabic history-writing in the medieval period. He is the author of The Holy City of Medina: Sacred Space in Early Islamic Arabia (Cambridge University Press, 2014).
Annliese Nef Annliese Nef is currently Maîtresse de Conférences at the University Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne. She is a specialist of the history of Sicily between the Ninth and the thirteenth century. She is the author of Conquérir et gouverner la Sicile islamique aux XIe et XIIe siècles (École française de Rome, 2011) and has edited A Companion to Medieval Palermo (Brill, 2013).
Vivien Prigent Vivien Prigent is a researcher in the Centre National pour la Recherche Scientifique. He was a fellow of the Ecole française de Rome, and is now in charge of Classical and Byzantine Studies at the Maison française d’ Oxford. He is a specialist of Byzantine sigillography and numismatics, working on administrative and monetary history, with special attention to Sicily.
Marion Rivoal Marion Rivoal, Ph.D., is currently in charge of the local branch of the Data and Service Center for the Humanities (dasch.swiss) at the University of Lausanne, Switzerland. She has specialised in knowledge modeling for research data management. She has completed a Ph.D. in archaeology studying land use in Late Antiquity, settlement patterns and rural economics in Central Syria, relying on survey data gathered within the French research programme “Marges arides de Syrie du Nord” and other sources (geodata, aerial and kite photographs, field surveys and excavations, epigraphy, etc.).
Marie-Odile Rousset Marie-Odile Rousset is archaeologist, specialized in the study of medieval Middle East. She is currently researcher at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (Archéorient, Lyon). Her research focuses on urban morphology, domestic architecture, Islamic pottery and settlement evolution in a diachronic perspective. She was “pensionnaire” at the French Institute of Arabic Studies in Damascus and scientific member of the French Institute of Orientlal Archaeology in Cairo. She is director of the archaeological mission of Hadir Qinnasrin (Syria) and member of the geo-archaeological research programme “Marges arides de Syrie du Nord” since 1996.
Gesa Schenke Gesa Schenke is a Coptologist with a background in archaeology, Classics, and Egyptology, and currently a research associate in The Cult of Saints in Late Antiquity project at the University of Oxford. She specializes in early Coptic literary and documentary texts. Her publications include a book on the financial and social aspects of Roman jewellery (2003), a text edition of the fourth-century Coptic Testament of Job (2009), a book on the Coptic hagiographical dossier of the Egyptian healing saint Coluthus (2013), and a volume of Coptic documentary texts from the early Islamic period (2016).
Petra M. Sijpesteijn Petra Sijpesteijn is professor of Arabic at Leiden University. Her research concentrates on recovering the experiences of Muslims and non-Muslims living under Islamic rule, using the vast stores of radically under-used documents surviving from the early Islamic world. Started in 2017, she manages an international research project entitled “Embedding Conquest: Naturalising Muslim Rule in the Early Islamic Empire (600–1000)”, funded by the European Research Council. Since 2014, Petra Sijpesteijn has been director of the Leiden University Centre for the Study of Islam and Society (LUCIS). She is the author of Shaping a Muslim State: The World of a Mid-Eighth-Century Egyptian Official (Oxford University Press, 2013).
Peter Verkinderen Peter Verkinderen studied Classics, and Languages and Cultures of the Near East at Ghent University, where he received his Ph.D. in 2009 with a dissertation on the evolution of the fluvial landscape of lower Iraq in the early Islamic period. This was published in 2015 as Waterways of Iraq and Iran. He currently works as a Research Associate in the ERC project “The Early Islamic Empire at Work: The View from the Regions toward the Center” at the University of Hamburg, where he focuses on the province of Fārs.
Luke Yarbrough Luke Yarbrough, PhD. (2012), Princeton University, is Assistant Professor of Islamic Studies in the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Cultures at the University of California, Los Angeles. His work deals principally with inter-communal boundaries and relations in the premodern Islamic world. His edition and translation of a thirteenth-century Arabic literary polemic from Egypt appeared as The Sword of Ambition: Bureaucratic Rivalry in Medieval Egypt (New York: NYU Press, 2016). He is completing a monograph on the premodern Islamic discourse surrounding non-Muslim state officials.
Khaled Younes Khaled Younes, Ph.D. (2013) at Leiden University, is currently working as a lecturer of Islamic history and civilization at the University of Sadat City in Egypt and as a research associate at the French Institute for Oriental Archaeology in Cairo (IFAO). His research focuses on Arabic papyri, making editions of unpublished documents and using them to study the history of early Islamic Egypt.