Assistant Professor

Biography

I am a historian of the medieval Mediterranean, focusing in particular on Iberia and North Africa. I’m most interested in how people from different religious, linguistic, and ethnocultural backgrounds interacted with one another and how this influenced the ways they wrote about their shared histories.

Currently, I’m at work on my first monograph, Narrating Conquest and Colonization in the Medieval Western Mediterranean. This book project draws on Arabic, Latin, and Romance chronicles from the 8^th through the 14^th centuries to examine how Muslims and Christians narrated political and religious conflict, exploring the extent to which writers across the Strait of Gibraltar viewed their history as a shared one and wrote within a common historical framework. My research has been supported by generous funding from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the American Historical Association, the Medieval Academy of America, and the American Institute for Maghrib Studies, among others.

My course offerings focus on premodern Islamic history, as well as exploring my interests in interfaith relations, gender and sexuality, long-distance travel, and connectivity between North Africa, the Middle East, and Europe in the Middle Ages.

Research

Medieval Mediterranean, Iberia and North Africa, Muslim-Christian relations, identity and memory, gender and sexuality

Education