Notes on Contributors

Lyall Armstrong holds a PhD from the University of Chicago and is Assistant Professor of History at the American University of Beirut, where he teaches Islamic History and Thought. He published The Quṣṣāṣ in Early Islam (Brill, 2017). He is currently interested in early Islamic views of death and dying as well as marriage and divorce in Islamic law.

Carl Davila holds a PhD in Arabic Studies from Yale University and currently teaches Middle East history at The College at Brockport (State University of New York). He has published two books on the cultural history and texts of the Andalusian music tradition of Morocco, as well as several articles about the social and literary dimensions of these texts. His current work deals with the history and social lives of Kunnāsh al-Hāʾik.

Nadia Maria El Cheikh is Professor of History at the American University of Beirut. She received her BA in History and Archeology at AUB and her PhD degree in History and Middle Eastern Studies from Harvard University in 1992. Her book Byzantium Viewed by the Arabs was published by the Harvard Middle Eastern Monographs in 2004 and translated into Turkish and Greek. She has co-authored 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, 2013). Her most recent book, Women, Islam and Abbasid Identity, was published in 2015 by Harvard University Press. In 2016 she was appointed Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at the American University of Beirut.

Matthew L. Keegan is the Moinian Assistant Professor of Asian and Middle Eastern Cultures at Barnard College of Columbia University. He received his PhD from New York University, taught at the American University of Sharjah, and completed a postdoc at the Free University of Berlin. His work focuses on the intersections of Arabic literature and Islamic thought in the pre-colonial period. His book project explores the vast commentary tradition on the Maqāmāt of al-Ḥarīrī. He also has forthcoming publications on Crusader-era poetry and Islamic legal riddles.

Boutheina Khaldi holds a PhD in Arabic and Comparative Literature from Indiana University and is Professor of Arabic and translation studies at the American University of Sharjah. She has published a monograph in English: Egypt Awakening in the Early Twentieth Century: Mayy Ziyādah’s Intellectual Circles (Palgrave, 2012), a book in Arabic: Al-Muḍmar fī al-Tarassul al-Niswī al-ʿArabī (2015) (The Implicit in Arab Women’s Epistolary Writing), a novel titled Ikhtāl, and co-edited three books: Al-Adab al-ʿArabī al-Ḥadīth: Mukhtārāt, al-Wafī fī turāth al-ʿArab al-thaqāfī, and Turāth al-ʿArab al-maʿrifī, in addition to a number of peer-reviewed articles.

Enass Khansa holds a PhD in Islamic Studies from Georgetown University and is currently Assistant Professor at the Department of Arabic and Near Eastern Languages at the American University of Beirut. She previously held the Aga Khan Fellowship in the History of Islamic Art and Architecture at Harvard University (2017) and the Andrew W. Mellon Fellowship with UNESCO’s World Heritage Conservation Project at Santiago de Compostela (2016). She joined AGYA (Arab-German Young Academy) in 2019.

Jeremy Kurzyniec is working on his doctoral dissertation at Yale University, which focuses on Abū al-Ḥasan ʿAlī ibn Naṣr al-Kātib’s Jawāmiʿ al-ladhdha (“Compendium of Pleasure”) and its place in the wider genre of kutub al-bāh. His previous degrees are in Classics and Byzantine Studies.

David Larsen holds a PhD in Comparative Literature from the University of California, Berkeley, and teaches at New York University in Liberal Studies. His translation of the Names of the Lion of Ibn Khālawayh (Wave Books, 2017) received the 2018 Harold Morton Landon Translation Award from the Academy of American Poets, and his verse translations appear in the literary press at large.

Nathaniel A. Miller holds a PhD in Arabic Language and Literature from the University of Chicago and is currently a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow in the Department of Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Cambridge. His research focuses on pre-modern Arabic poetry, and he is working on his first book on the anthology of the Hudhayl tribe’s pre- and early Islamic poets. A second project, supported by the Leverhulme Trust, revolves around the geographically-organized twelfth-century poetry anthology Kharīdat al-qaṣr wa-jarīdat al-ʿaṣr (“The Pearl of the Palace and Annals of the Age”), by Saladin’s secretary, ʿImād al-Dīn al-Iṣfahānī (d. 597/1201). He has written articles published and forthcoming in Arabica, Mediterranean Studies, and The Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society.

Suleiman A. Mourad holds a PhD in Arabic and Islamic Studies from Yale University and is Professor of Religion at Smith College (USA) and Director of the Nantes Institute for Advanced Study (France). His research focuses on Muslims as makers and interpreters of their own religious, historical and legal traditions, with a special emphasis on Quranic Studies, Islamic law, Jerusalem, Jihad ideology, the Crusader Period, and on the challenges of modernity that led to major changes in Muslims’ perception of and attitude towards their own history and classical thought. His publications include The Intensification and Reorientation of Sunni Jihad Ideology in the Crusader Period (Brill 2013), and The Mosaic of Islam (Verso 2016).

Bilal Orfali holds a PhD in Arabic Studies (2009) from Yale University and is Sheikh Zayed Chair for Arabic and Islamic Studies and Chairperson of the Department of Arabic and Near Eastern Languages at the American University of Beirut. He previously held the M.S. Sofia Chair in Arabic Studies at Ohio State University. He specializes in Arabic literature, Sufism, and quranic Studies. He co-edits al-Abhath Journal and Brill’s series Texts and Studies on the Qurʾan. He is the author and editor of more than twenty books on Arabic Studies. His recent publications include Light Upon Light (Brill 2019), Insatiable Appetite: Food as Cultural Signifier in the Middle East and Beyond (Brill, 2019), The Anthologist’s Art (Brill, 2016), The Book of Noble Character (Brill, 2015), The Comfort of the Mystics (Brill, 2013), Sufism, Black and White (Brill, 2012), and In the Shadow of Arabic (Brill, 2011).

Hans-Peter Pökel holds a PhD from the University of Jena and taught Classical Arabic Literature and Early Islamic History at the Free University Berlin. He is a researcher in Arabic and Islamic Studies and as of recently Head Librarian at the Orient-Institut Beirut. His research interests include Islamic theology in the context of interreligious relations in the Abbasid period, and he has worked on anthropological questions, masculinities and the history of sexualities and emotions within adab literature.

Isabel Toral holds a PhD (1997) from the University of Tübingen, and has been senior faculty member and lecturer at the Free University of Berlin in the Department of Arabic Studies since 2018. She has also held various research positions and fellowships in Freiburg, Berlin, London (Marie Curie Senior Fellowship), Göttingen and Mainz. Her main publishing and research fields are Arabia and the Near East in Late Antiquity; cultural identity and cultural contact/translation; Arabic occult sciences; adab, fiction and encyclopaedias; and al-Andalus.