Webinar: “The Making of an Islamic City-State: Genealogy, Religion and Sovereignty in Nasrid Granada” by Mohamad Ballan, Harvard University, March 7, 2022 @ 12:00 PM

“The Making of an Islamic City-State: Genealogy, Religion and Sovereignty in Nasrid Granada”

Mohamad Ballan (PhD, UChicago 2019) is currently an Assistant Professor of Medieval History at Stony Brook University. His research focuses on the intellectual and political history of the medieval Islamic world, with a focus on Islamic Spain and North Africa between 1200 and 1600. He is currently finalizing his first monograph, tentatively titled Lord of the Pen and Sword: Genealogy and Sovereignty in the Islamic West, which closely examines the phenomenon of the “scholar-statesman”—litterateurs, physicians, and jurists who ascended to the highest administrative and executive offices of state—in late medieval Islamic Spain and North Africa. It focuses on the career and writings of Lisān al-Dīn ibn al-Khaṭīb (1313–1374), the preeminent historian, philosopher and chancellor of the Nasrid Kingdom of Granada, situating this figure within a vast intellectual-political network of scholars, functionaries and statesmen that extended from Seville to Damascus. Mohamad has previously held appointments as a Junior Fellow at the Dartmouth Society of Fellows and as a Mellon Faculty Fellow at the Medieval Institute at the University of Notre Dame.

Register here (please use a Harvard email address): https://harvard.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJclf-ivpzIsE9Wfxzk0oQr6F–MbqqsBmpX