Scholar - Women Also Know History

Participant Info

Keywords: Middle East, Islam, medieval, Shi'ism, sectarianism, Islam in the United States

About Me: I am an Assistant Professor of History at Indiana University of Pennsylvania in Indiana, PA (about an hour away from Pittsburgh). I teach World History (focusing on the Late Antique and Medieval Mediterranean) and a series of courses on Middle Eastern history, both modern and medieval. My research focus is on medieval Shi’ism and I have a forthcoming book, Medieval Islamic Sectarianism, with ARC-Medieval Press’ “Past Imperfect” series.

My new research project focuses on Islam in the contemporary United States. Working with two colleagues, I am beginning to collect oral histories of Muslims living in western Pennsylvania.

Recent Publications: Forthcoming 2018: Medieval Islamic Sectarianism: How Tenth-Century Political Competition Helped Forge a Narrative of Sunni-Shi’i Conflict (Bradford, UK: Arc Medieval Press).

“Thomas Jefferson’s Qur’an: The American Tradition of Tolerance and Free Speech” on The Immanent Frame: Secularism, Religion, and the Public Sphere (The Social Science Research Council’s interdisciplinary website). https://tif.ssrc.org/2017/04/26/the-american-tradition-of-tolerance-and-free-speech/

“Universal Ideals and Limited Power: Competing Tenth-Century Islamic Empires,” in Zhang Dianqing and Wang Xi (eds.), Selected Essays on the Research and Teaching of World History in Global Age. (Beijing, China: Commercial Press 商务印书馆, 2017).

“The Lost Origins of the Daylamites and the Construction of a New Ethnic Legacy for the Buyids” in Rebecca Futo Kennedy and Molly Jones-Lewis (eds.), The Routledge Handbook of Identity and the Environment in the Classical and Early Medieval Worlds. (London: Routledge, 2015).