Associate Professor, History
About
I am trained as a historian of medieval Europe and the Islamic world. My research and writing focus on the social, cultural, and intellectual history of religious interaction in the medieval Mediterranean. In particular, I am interested in projects that combine the use of Latin, Arabic, and Romance archival sources. I have lived and worked extensively in Spain, Italy, France, and across North Africa. In 2009, I was named a Carnegie Scholar as part of the Carnegie Corporation's effort to promote original scholarship on Muslim societies.
My first book, The Mercenary Mediterranean, examined the service of Muslim soldiers from North Africa to the Christian kings of the Crown of Aragon in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. Far from marking the triumph of toleration, I argued, the alliance of Christian kings and Muslim soldiers depended on and reproduced ideas of religious difference. The Mercenary Mediterranean received the Herbert Baxter Adams Prize from the American Historical Association for the best first book in European history, the L. Carl Brown Prize from the American Institute of Maghreb Studies for the best book in North African studies, and the Jans F. Verbruggen Prize from De Re Militari for the best book in medieval military history.
I am currently working on two projects. The first entitled The Impostor Sea: The Making of the Medieval Mediterranean, follows the activities of criminal merchants—pirates and smugglers—in order to rethink the relationship between religion and trade. Rather than “enemies of all,” this book argues that these figures were central to the making of new legal, religious, and racial boundaries in the late medieval Mediterranean. The second, entitled The Eastern Question, examines western views of Islam from the seventh century to the present, arguing that both positive and negative images of Islam across history share the same polemical genealogy.
I am a councilor of the Medieval Academy of America as well as a board member of the American Institute of Maghrib Studies and Spain and North Africa Project.
I sit on the advisory board of the Cornell Press series Medieval Societies, Religions, and Cultures (MSRC) and the editorial board of Brill's Studies in Medieval and Reformation Traditions.
Please note: As of January 2021, I will be joining the History Department at Yale University.
