Reuven Amitai
Eliyahu Elath Professor for Muslim History | Hebrew University of Jerusalem
Reuven Amitai is Eliyahu Elath Professor for the History of the Muslim Countries at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and studies the history of the pre-modern Midle East and nearby regions. He is interested in the medieval history of the Turks and Mongols, especially the history of the Ilkhanate (the Mongols state in the Middle East); the Mamluk Sultanate of Egypt and Syria; the Crusades in the Levant and Muslim responses; the military history of the medieval Middle East World; conversion to Islam; late medieval Arabic epigraphy; and Palestine in the late medieval period. From 2010 to 2014, Reuven Amitai was dean of the Faculty of Humanities at the Hebrew University. From 2014 to 2016, he was a senior fellow at the Univeresity of Bonn, at the “Annemarie Schimmel Kolleg: History and Society during the Mamluk Era (1250-1517).” In the last few years, he has co-edited these volumes: Slavery and the Slave Trade in the Eastern Mediterranean, 11th to 15th Centuries, published in 2017 by Brepols (co-editor: Christoph Cluse); The Mamluk Sultanate from the Perspective of Regional and World History, published in 2019 by University of Bonn Press (co-editor: Stephan Conermann). His current research is mainly focused on Palestine during the later Middle Ages, i.e., after the Crusader period up to the Ottoman conquest in 1516.
Dimiter Angelov
Dumbarton Oaks Professor of Byzantine History | Harvard University
Dimiter Angelov works on the intellectual and political history of the Byzantine Empire, with a focus on the later centuries. He is the author of Imperial deology and Political Thought in Byzatium, 1203-1330 (Cambridge. 2007) and The Byzantine Hellene: The Life of Theodore Laskaris and Byzantium in the Thirteenth Century (Cambridge, 2019).
Michel Balard
Emeritus Professor | University Paris 1 – Panthéon Sorbonne
Professor “agrégé” in History in 1959, Michel Balard has been member of the French School at Rom (1965-1968), assistant at the Sorbonne (1968-1976), and full Professor at the Universities of Reims (1976-1988), Paris XII (1988-1991) and Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne (1991-2004) and emeritus Professor since 2004. He has been president of the French Association of Medievalists (SHMESP), of the French Committee of Historians, and of the Federation of the Historical Associations of Ile-de-France. He is the author of 45 volumes about the history of Genoa, the Crusades, the colonization in the Middle Ages, the Black Sea, the economical relations between East and West in the Middle Ages, and of 345 papers about these themes. His latest book about the History of the spices in the Middle Ages will be published by Perrin in November 2023..
Hannah Barker
Associate Professor of History | Arizona State University
Hannah Barker is an associate professor of medieval history at Arizona State University. She studies connections between the Black Sea and the Mediterranean during the thirteenth through fifteenth centuries, especially the slave trade which flourished during this period and the transmission of plague leading to the Black Death. Her book, That Most Precious Merchandise: The Mediterranean Trade in Black Sea Slaves, 1260-1500, was published in 2019. It received the Paul E. Lovejoy Prize and the ASU Institute for Humanities Research book prize, as well as honorable mentions for the Mediterranean Seminar’s Wadjih F. al-Hamwi Prize and the Middle East Medievalists book prize. Her interests include the role of physicians in slave markets; forms of resistance by enslaved people; how medieval Italian notaries described slaves and voiced their statements in legal acts; Mamluk ethnographic comparisons between northern and southern barbarians; and local slaving patterns in the Black Sea.
Nicola Di Cosmo
Professor of East Asian Studies | School of Historical Studies
Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton
Nicola Di Cosmo received his PhD from the Department of Central Eurasian Studies at Indiana University (1991), and held research and teaching positions at the University of Cambridge, Harvard University, and the University of Canterbury (New Zealand) before joining the Institute for Advanced Study in 2003. His research focuses on the history of the relations between China and Inner Asia from prehistory to the early modern period, with a special emphasis on the social, political and military history of early nomadic empires. His publications include Ancient China and Its Enemies: The Rise of Nomadic Powers in East Asian History (2002), Manchu-Mongol Relations on the Eve of the Qing Conquest (2003), The Diary of a Manchu Soldier in Seventeenth Century China (2006) and Venezia e i Mongoli (2023). His edited and co-edited books include as Warfare in Inner Asian History (500-1800) (2002), The Cambridge History of Inner Asia (2009), Empires and Exchanges in Eurasian Late Antiquity (2018). His most recent research has explored the role of climate events in the history of medieval Eurasian empires. Research papers have been published in PNAS, Climate of the Past, Scientific Reports, and the Journal of Interdisciplinary History.
Eurydice Georganteli
Lecturer on the History of Art and Architecture | Harvard University
Eurydice Georganteli studied Art History and Archaeology at Aristotle University in Thessaloniki, and Numismatics at the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge in the UK. Before joining Harvard University as Lecturer in Art History and Numismatics, she was the Keeper of Coins at the Barber Institute of Fine Arts and Lecturer in Numismatics at the University of Birmingham, UK (2000-2016), where she spearheaded the conservation, digitization, and display of the Coins and Seals Collection, and directed the Graduate Program in Numismatics (2001-2012).
An award-winning curator, author, and academic tutor, she has lectured and held research fellowships in Europe and the United States. From 2012-2016, she was Marie Curie Senior Research Fellow and Principal Investigator of two European research projects on cultural routes and digital heritage. A specialist in South-Eastern Europe and the Eastern Mediterranean, Georganteli has taught, curated exhibitions, and published on late antique and medieval art, numismatics, archaeology, portable antiquities, cultural heritage, and digital storytelling. She uses archaeological evidence, written sources, and the changing patterns in the geography of transport to trace economic and cultural exchange in late antique and medieval Europe and the Middle East. She is a Trustee of Hellenic College Holy Cross, a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries of London, and the Academic Coordinator of the Harvard Study Abroad Program in Greece.
Rachel Goshgarian
Associate Professor and Assistant Head | History Department | Lafayette College
Rachel Goshgarian is Associate Professor of History at Lafayette College. Her first monograph, The City in Late Medieval Anatolia: Inter-faith Interactions and Urbanism in the Middle East, is forthcoming with IB Tauris in 2023. She co-edited Crafting History with Ilham Khuri-Makdisi and Ali Yaycioglu (2022) and Architecture and Landscape in Medieval Anatolia (2017) with Patricia Blessing. Among her forthcoming projects are: a second mongraph, Armeno-Turkish and the Space of Language in the Late Medieval and Early Modern Worlds: Manuscript Production and the Circulation of Ideas, Literature, and People; Akabi Hikayesi, a translation of Vartan Pasha’s 1851 novel from Armeno-Turkish into English, with Maral Aktokmakiyan and Tamar Boyadjian; and a co-edited volume called Armenian Geographies: History and Cultural Production from Anania Shirakatsi to Eremya Celebi Komurciyan, with Christina Maranci.
Dmitry Korobeynikov
Associate Professor of History | University of Albany
Dmitry Korobeynikov (AKA Dimitri Korobeinikov)’s chief research is the relations between Byzantium and the world of Islam from the middle of the eleventh century until the fall of Byzantium in 1453 and 1461. His book, Byzantium and the Turks in the Thirteenth Century, focuses on interactions between the Empire of Nicaea, Trebizond, the Seljuk Sultanate of Rum and the Mongols. He currently works on the non-Greek seals of the eleventh century in the collection of Dumbarton Oaks.
Nicholas S. M. Matheou
Lecturer in Global Medieval History | University of Edinburgh
Nicholas S. M. Matheou is a social and economic historian, and lecturer in Global Medieval History at the University of Edinburgh. His research situates eastern Anatolia, Upper Mesopotamia and Caucasia firmly within an integrated Afro-Eurasia, and takes Armenian material as a crucially decentred and decolonising window on the Global Middle Ages. Nicholas completed his first degree in Edinburgh and postgraduate studies at the University of Oxford, and before his current appointment held positions at the Institute for Historical Research in the University of London’s School of Advanced Study, and the Armenian Institute, London. Nicholas’ current research project is a social and economic history of the now abandoned city of Ani, 900-1400, placing it’s emergence, development and decline in the global transformations brought about by the Afro-Eurasian Commercial Revolution and the Mongol world-empire.
Uli Schamiloglu
Professor and chair in the Department of Kazakh Language and Turkic Studies at Nazarbayev University in Astana, Kazakhstan| Professor Emeritus, University of Wisconsin-Madison
Uli Schamiloglu is Professor and chair in the Department of Kazakh Language and Turkic Studies at Nazarbayev University in Astana, Kazakhstan. He is also director of the Ph.D. in Eurasian Studies program at Nazarbayev University. He received his B.A. in Middle East Languages and Cultures from Columbia College in 1979 (with a concentration in Turkish Studies) and his Ph.D. in Middle Eastern and Central Asian History from Columbia University in 1986. He also studied at Szeged University in Hungary in Fall 1982. He has taught previously at Indiana University-Bloomington (1983-1989) and at the University of Wisconsin-Madison (1989-2017), where he is now professor emeritus.
His main research interests include the Turkic languages and cultures of the Middle East and Central Eurasia, the socio-economic history of the Middle East and Central Eurasia in the medieval period (especially the Golden Horde), the history of Turko-Islamic civilization, and modern intellectual movements among the Muslim Turkic peoples of the Ottoman and Russian Empires. Since the late 1980s he has also been interested in the role of the bubonic plague in the history of medieval Central Eurasia, especially the impact of plague on the history of populations, written monuments, literary languages, religiosity, and other spheres.
Rustam Shukurov
Visiting Scholar, School of History | St Andrew’s University
Rustam Shukurov, D.Sc. in History (2012), Visiting Scholar at the University of St Andrews, worked at Moscow State University for more than 30 years as a lecturer in Byzantine and Medieval studies. He has published widely on Byzantium, as well as Iranian and Turkic History, including “The Grand Komnenoi and the Orient, 1204–1461 (Moscow, 2001) and “The Byzantine Turks, 1204–1461” (Leiden, 2016).
Filip Van Tricht
Independent Scholar
Filip Van Tricht obtained his Ph.D. in 2003 at the University of Ghent. In 1997-2002 and again in 2010-2020 he was affiliated as a researcher/guest professor with the Department of History at that university. Presently he works in local government as a staff collaborator of one of the political groups in the city council of Ghent. He has authored publications on various aspects of the Byzantine empire and Latin Romania in the 13th century, including The Latin Renovatio of Byzantium. The Empire of Constantinople (1204-1228)(2011) and The Horoscope of Emperor Baldwin II. Political and Sociocultural Dynamics in Latin-Byzantine Constantinople (2019). Continuing his academic works as an independent scholar he is currently working on a biography of the second Latin emperor of Constantinople, Henry of Flanders/Hainaut (ca. 1176/77-1216) as his main project.
Ittai Weinryb
Associate Professor of Art History | Bard Graduate Center
Ittai Weinryb is Associate Professor at the Bard Graduate Center in NYC. He is currently finishing a book on art and material culture circulating in the Black Sea region during the Middle Ages and another monograph which centers on the sentiment of Hope as a category of artistic creativity. Weinryb just published his first book in German, Die Hildesheimer Avantgarde: Kunst und Kolonialismus in mittelalterlichen Deutschland. He is the co-founder (together with Caroline Fowler and Princeton University Press) of the book series Art/Work which is set to narrate a new history of art founded in the study of objects, materials, and technology. Weinryb also co-edit the journal W86th. His first book, The Bronze Object in the Middle Ages (2016) was awarded the International Center of Medieval Art Book Prize (2017). The catalog accompanying his exhibition, Agents of Faith: Votive Objects in Time and Place (2018) was chosen as one of the New York Time’s best art books (2018) and was Awarded the A+C Book Prize (2019). Weinryb was a doctoral fellow at the Kunsthistorisches Institut, MPGI, Florence (2008-2009); a member of the School for Historical Studies, Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton (2012); a Mellon Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, National Gallery, Washington, DC (2019); a John Simon Guggenheim Fellow (2019); and am currently a fellow at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin (2022). Weinryb received his Ph.D from Johns Hopkins University in 2010 and BA from Tel Aviv University in 2003.