Associate Professor of History

(Humanities and Information Scholar, Spring 2027)

My project is to use the lenses of memory and gender to analyze Islamic biographical dictionaries compiled in al-Andalus (Islamic Iberia) and Ifriqiyya (Tunisia) between the ninth and twelfth centuries. Conventionally, biographical dictionaries are read as directories of Muslim scholars, inventories of transmissions, and genealogies of learning; some include moralizing and exemplifying stories. Reading biographical dictionaries as works of memory deepens our understanding of the importance of continuity with the past to the definition of knowledge and communities of learning. Each author’s perspective on his community was personal and informed by and contributed to the collective memory of his generation of scholars and the cultural memory of the origins of the community. The individual authors were familiar with the work of their predecessors, and together the biographical dictionaries in this period provide a multi-authored communal history. All the authors and their subjects are men, and I investigate the texts’ constructions of masculinity and how they are rooted in the memory of territorial conquest and the introduction of Islam. I draw attention to the way the authors, writing in specific historical contexts, valorized embodied forms of religious commitment, not only asceticism and extreme devotion to prayer, but also endurance of “ordeals” of political oppression and participation in ribat (retreat to a frontier outpost) and jihad (war against non-Muslim enemies). Comprehensively, the biographies exemplify how fields and methods of Islamic knowledge and learning became more diversified, specialized, and bookish in the centuries following the Islamic conquests. Scholars dedicated their lives to teaching and writing, scrutinized and challenged each other’s methods and arguments, and rivaled each other in influence and expertise. Nevertheless, members of the scholarly community in Ifriqiyya and al-Andalus settled in border fortresses and participated in military campaigns not only because the times called for it, but because these were acts of devotion and demonstration of religious conviction embedded in the culture of knowledge.