2017 Symposium Participants

Mohammed Abattouy
Professor of History & Philosophy of Science
Mohammed V University, Morocco

Mohammed Abattouy is professor of history and philosophy of science at Mohamed Vth University in Rabat, Morocco. He began his career by investigating the history of science in the 17th century and specialized in Galileo's manuscripts of physics for his PhD dissertation from Paris I university (June 1989). Between 1992 and 1995, he worked in the ‘Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique’ (Paris and Nice) and at the ‘Observatoire de la Côte d’Azur’ (Nice) in collaboration with French and Italian colleagues in history of mathematics, on one hand, and on exploring the genesis of modern science in the works of young Galileo, on the other hand. He joined as a scholar the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin (1996-2003), where he shifted his academic focus to the investigation of the history of Arabic classical sciences. During this period, he investigated the history of Arabic mechanics and reconstructed the tradition of the Arabic science of weights (ʿilm al-athqāl) which he reconstructed in full from manuscripts. From March 2007 to May 2014, he was senior research fellow at the Foundation of Science, Technology and Civilization (FSTC) in Manchester, UK, where he acted as chief editor of the academic web portal Muslim Heritage.com and participated in major projects of the Foundation, including the content preparation for ‘1001 Inventions,’ an educational touring exhibition.

Mohammed Abattouy is the author of several books and more than 50 articles of history of science. He participated in numerous conferences on history of science and organized several of them himself. His book published in English in London in summer 2014 on Al-Isfizārī’s corpus of mechanics was awarded two prestigious prizes, an international award for translation of science from Arabic to other languages and the prize of the best Moroccan book of social sciences in 2016.

Currently he prepares for publication the corpus of the Arabic science of weights, with English translation and commentary and works on several books on Galileo’s science, including a book-length essay in French on Galileo’s manuscripts of physics, the first Arabic translation of Galileo’s great book of mathematical physics the Discorsi published in 1638, and another book exploring the unique case represented by the ‘Galileo Affair’ as a case study of the complex problem of the relationship between science and religion.

Anne Berthelot
Co-Director of Medieval Studies
Professor of French & Medieval Studies
University of Connecticut, USA

An alumna of the École Normale Supérieure and "agrégée des Lettres" (specialized in Latin and Ancient Greek), Anne Berthelot is Professor of French and Medieval Studies at the University of Connecticut. She specializes in Arthurian Literature with a comparative approach and has published numerous books and articles on this topic, especially on Merlin. She is currently engaged in a multi-volume project on Late Arthurian Texts in Europe (LATE) with Professor Christine Ferlampin-Acher (Université Rennes 2) and working on a literary study of the so-called Roman des fils du roi Constant by Baudouin Butor.

Recently, she has started exploring magical texts from the Middle Ages and the so-called Renaissance period, and has created several courses - at both undergraduate and graduate levels - on the history of magic, and variations of belief in the supernatural area.

 

Nicola Carpentieri
Assistant Professor and Chair of Arabic & Islamic Studies
University of Connecticut, USA

Nicola Carpentieri is Assistant Professor of Arabic Studies, in the Department of Literature, Cultures, and Languages at the University of Connecticut. His research focuses on Arabic literature across the Mediterranean and on transcultural approaches to the history of medicine. He received his Ph.D. in Arabic and Islamic studies from Harvard University in 2012. Subsequently, he worked at the University of Manchester in the United Kingdom and at the Autonomous University of Barcelona in Spain. His most recent work is centered on the Arabic songs and odes composed by court secretaries (kuttāb) in medieval Sicily. These long-neglected texts are compellingly entangled with the history of cultural tropes and practices of the wider Mediterranean: the early Italian poetic tradition, Byzantium, the Muslim East, North Africa, and Iberia. His other academic interests cover Arabic medical texts (particularly on psychosomatics), Greek into Arabic and Arabic into Latin translations, the 'School of Toledo,’ the Sicilian-Arab poet Ibn Ḥamdīs, and contemporary Arabic writings.

 

Andrea Celli
Assistant Professor of Italian & Mediterranean Studies
University of Connecticut, USA

Andrea Celli is Assistant Professor of Italian and Mediterranean Studies at the University of Connecticut. He graduated in “Letteratura moderna” at the Univerità di Padova, Italy, where he also received his Ph.D. Before joining the University of Connecticut, he lectured at the University of Lugano, Switzerland. He recently edited a collection of essays titled, “Experience and representation of Islam in Mediterranean Europe (16th-18th centuries),” Rivista di Storia e Letteratura religiosa (Olschki), LI/3, 2015. Celli has published several monographs and book chapters on issues related to European interest in Islam and translated a number of works from French and Arabic authors (e.g. the Orientalist Louis Massignon and the poet Adonis). He is currently working on two main projects: a monograph on early-modern treatments of the narrative of Hagar and Ishmael (Genesis, 16;21) in the context of interreligious polemics in the Counterreformist Mediterranean; and a second book whose tentative title is Stories of Pledge, Slavery and Love: Essays on Italian Literature in the Context of Medieval and Early-Modern Mediterranean.

 

Ahmed Chahlane
Professor Emeritus of Arabic & Judaic Philology
Mohammed V University, Morocco

Ahmed Chahlane is Professor Emeritus of Arabic and Judaic Philology at Mohammed V University in Rabat, Morocco, where he served on the faculty from 1974 to 2009. From 1991 to 1995, Chahlane served as the Director of the Office for the Arabization of the Arab world, at the ALECSO Ligue Arabe. Chahlane received his bachelor’s degree from the Faculty of Arts at Fez (Morocco) and an École normale supérieure diploma in 1967. He received a second BA in Hebrew at the Sorbonne and a master’s degree in Modern Hebrew at the Institut des Langues et Civilisations Orientales, Paris in 1974. He also holds a Ph.D. in Islamic Studies from the Sorbonne and a Doctorat d’Etat in Islamic Studies (Averroès et la pensée juive au Moyen Age) from  Mohammed V University. Since 1991, Chahlane has served as the Secretary General of the Moroccan Association of Oriental Studies; and he is a member of the Association of Moroccan Authors for publication. He has also been a visiting professor at many universities around the world, a member of the ERA (CNRS), Paris, and the Secretary General of the Association for Humanities Research at Mohammed V University. His publications include: The Book of Direction to the Duties of the Heart Bahya Ben Joseph Ibn Pakuda Men (2010); Les Juifs du Maroc depuis leur origine jusqu’à l’heure de leur dispersion (2009); and De la Langue phénicienne à l’Aarabe. Une étude comparative dans les langues sémitiques et La lexicographie (2009). The following works will be published soon: Édition critique de la traduction hébraïque de Kitab et Al-kashf 'an manahij al-adilla fi'aqaid al-milla d’Averroès (La vraie méthode des preuves dans les dogmes de la foi) (Traduction médiévale); Édition critique de Kitab al-muhadara wa-l-mudakara de Moïs ben Ezra; and, a translation from Hebrew to Arabic of, Paraphrase de L'Éthique à Nicomaque d’Aristote, par Ibn Ruchd (Averroès). Chahlane has also published hundreds of scholarly and press articles on history, Medieval Judao-Arabic philosophy, comparative literature, and comparative lexicography, and he has translated many texts from Hebrew and French into Arabic.

 

Susan Einbinder
Professor of Hebrew, Judaic Studies & Comparative Literature
University of Connecticut, USA

Susan Einbinder is the author of two monographs on medieval French Jews, Beautiful Death: Jewish Poetry and Martyrdom from Medieval France (Princeton 2002) and No Place of Rest: Literature, Expulsion and the Memory of Medieval France (Philadelphia 2009). Her next book, After the Black Death: Plague and Commemoration among Iberian Jews, is scheduled to appear next spring with the University of Pennsylvania Press. Prior to arriving at the University of Connecticut in 2012, she taught at the Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati, Ohio. She is a Fellow of the Medieval Academy of America and has been the grateful recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Institute for Advanced Studies, the New York Public Library’s Cullman Center for Scholars & Writers, the National Humanities Center, the UConn Humanities Institute and more.

 

Zaid Eyadat
Professor of Political Science & Human Rights
University of Jordan, Jordan
Director of Human Rights Programs in the Middle East
University of Connecticut, USA

Zaid Eyadat is Professor of Political Science and Human Rights, expert on international and comparative politics and the chairperson of the board of trustees and the advisory board of Arab Renascence for Development and Democracy (ARDD). He is the founding chairperson of the Department of Human Rights— which later became the Department of Political Development— and the founding Dean of the Prince al-Hussein School of International Studies at the University of Jordan. His training and research interests are in the fields of International politics, comparative politics, international political theory, modelling and game theory. He is a leading and distinguished expert on Middle East politics, Human Rights, Islamic thought and Islam & Human Rights. His research has been published in many leading scholarly journals.
Some of his published articles and book chapters include “Minorities in the Arab World: Faults and Faults Lines,” “Islamic Feminism: Roots, Development, and Policies," “The Calculus of Consensus: an Alternative Path to Arab Democracy,” "Fiqh Al-Aqalliyyât and the Arab Spring: Modern Islamic Theorizing," "Public Reason and Islamic Reason in the Post-Secular,” "The Rationality of Political Violence: Modelling Al-Qaeda vs. the United States," "A Transition Without Players: The Role of Political Parties in the Arab Revolutions," and "Arab Revolutions of 2011: An Explanatory Model.” He is also the co-editor of the book Migration, Security, and Citizenship in the Middle East, and the co-translator of Count Bernadotte's Mediation to Palestine 1948: Mediation and Assassination. He has just completed the translation of a book entitled Global Justice: Towards an International Theory of Human Rights.

 

Alexander Fidora
Research Professor at the Catalan Institution for Research and Advanced Studies (ICREA)
Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, Spain

Alexander Fidora, born 1975 in Offenbach, Germany, studied philosophy at the University of Frankfurt, obtaining his Ph.D. in 2003. He is a Research Professor of the Institució Catalana de Recerca i Estudis Avançats (ICREA) in the Department of Ancient and Medieval Studies of the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, where he co-directs the Institute of Medieval Studies. His research focuses on medieval philosophy, in particular, epistemology and metaphysics as well as the intercultural and interreligious dimensions of medieval thought, with more than forty books edited. Currently, he is directing the ERC Consolidator project: “The Latin Talmud” (2014-2018), which explores the hitherto unedited Latin translation of the Talmud prepared in Paris in 1244/45. Founded the Journal of Transcultural Medieval Studies, together with G. Hasselhoff and M. Tischler. He is also the vice-president of the Société Internationale pour l’Étude de la Philosophie Médiévale. Recent publications include:
- Latin-into-Hebrew: Texts in Contexts, ed. A. Fidora, H. Hames and Y. Schwartz, Leiden/Boston, 2013.
- Guido Terreni, O. Carm. († 1342): Studies and Texts, ed. A. Fidora, Barcelona/Madrid 2015.
- Arnau de Vilanova: Über den Antichrist und die Reform der Christenheit, German translation and introduction A. Fidora, Barcelona/Münster i. W., 2015.
- Appropriation, Interpretation and Criticism: Philosophical Exchanges between the Arabic, Hebrew and Latin Intellectual Traditions, ed. A. Fidora and N. Polloni, Barcelona/Rome, 2017.

 

Mayte Green-Mercado
Assistant Professor of History
Rutgers University, USA

Mayte Green-Mercado received her BA in History from the University of Puerto Rico, and her Ph.D. from the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations at the University of Chicago, specializing in Islamic Studies. She is currently Assistant Professor of History at Rutgers University in Newark, NJ, where she teaches courses on Islamic Civilization, Islamic history in Spain and North Africa, and early modern Mediterranean history. Her courses deal with questions of religion, politics, identity, and race and ethnicity in the medieval and early modern periods. Before joining Rutgers, she was Assistant Professor of Mediterranean Studies in the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures at the University of Michigan Ann Arbor. Green-Mercado’s research focuses on the religious, cultural, and political history of the early modern Iberian, Mediterranean, and Islamic worlds. Her book manuscript currently under review, titled A Morisco Apocalypse: The Politics of Prophecy in the Early Modern Mediterranean, studies the production and deployment of apocalyptic prophecies among Moriscos, Muslims who were forced to convert to Catholicism in 16th century Spain. Tracing the circulation of such prophecies within the Iberian Peninsula and the wider Mediterranean not only reveals a well-defined Morisco political culture, but it also places this minority group at the crossroads of the messianically-inflected Habsburg-Ottoman imperial rivalry for the control of the Mediterranean Sea. She has recently edited a special issue in the Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient (JESHO) forthcoming in January 2018, titled “Speaking the End Times: Early Modern Politics and Religion from Iberia to Central Asia,” that explores the cross-pollination of apocalyptic beliefs and practices among Muslims, Christians, and Jews in the early modern period. Her future projects include an exploration of Morisco diasporas and networks around the Mediterranean in the early modern period.

 

Daniel Hershenzon
Assistant Professor of Spanish
University of Connecticut, USA

Daniel Hershenzon is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Literatures, Cultures, and Languages at the University of Connecticut. His book entitled Early Modern Spain and the Mediterranean: Captivity, Commerce, and Communication (University of Pennsylvania Press, forthcoming 2018) explores the 17th century entangled histories of Spain, Morocco and Ottoman Algiers, arguing that captivity and ransom of Christians and Muslims shaped the Mediterranean as a socially, politically, and economically integrated region. Hershenzon has published articles in Past and Present, the Journal of Early Modern History, African Economic History, History Compass, Philological Encounters, and in other edited volumes. He held fellowships from the Social Science Research Council, Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, European University Institute in Florence, Institute for the Humanities at the University of Michigan, and the University of Connecticut’s Humanities Institute.

 

Ronald Kiener
Professor of Religious Studies
Trinity College, USA

Ronald C. Kiener is Professor and Chair of Religious Studies at Trinity College, and Director of Trinity’s Jewish Studies Program. Kiener received his BA in Hebrew Literature from the University of Minnesota in 1976, and earned his Ph.D. from the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Pennsylvania in 1984. Kiener is the co-author of The Early Kabbalah, part of the Classics of Western Spirituality series published by Paulist Press. He has also published articles in the field of medieval and modern Jewish and Islamic thought in a variety of scholarly journals. Kiener is currently working on a scientific edition of Saadia Gaon's Book of Beliefs and Opinions, to be published by the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities in Jerusalem.

 

Seth Kimmel
Assistant Professor of Medieval & Early Modern Cultural Studies
Columbia University, USA

Seth Kimmel is Assistant Professor of Medieval and Early Modern Cultural Studies in the Department of Latin American and Iberian Cultures at Columbia University. He is the author of Parables of Coercion: Conversion and Knowledge at the End of Islamic Spain (University of Chicago Press, 2015), which was awarded the 2017 Harry Levin Prize for the best first book in the field of comparative literature by the American Comparative Literature Association.

 

Daniel Lasker
Norbert Blechner Professor of Jewish Values
Ben-Gurion University, Israel

Daniel J. Lasker is the Norbert Blechner Professor of Jewish Values (emeritus) in the Goldstein-Goren Department of Jewish Thought at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Beer-Sheva, Israel. He holds a Ph.D., MA and BA from Brandeis University, and also studied at Hebrew University. Lasker has taught at Yale University, Princeton University, the University of Toronto, Ohio State University, University of Texas, University of Washington, Boston College and other institutions. He is the author of over 250 publications in the fields of medieval Jewish philosophy, especially on the thought of Rabbi Judah Halevi; the Jewish-Christian debate, including the edition of a number of central Jewish polemical texts; and Karaism. His most recent books are From Judah Hadassi to Elijah Bashyatchi: Studies in Late Medieval Karaite Philosophy (Leiden/Boston: Brill, 2008); and The Sage Simhah Isaac Lutski: An Eighteenth-Century Karaite Rabbi - Selected Writings (Jerusalem: Ben-Zvi Institute, 2015 [Hebrew]).

 

Benjamin Liu
Associate Professor of Hispanic Studies
University of California, Riverside, USA

Benjamin Liu is Associate Professor of Hispanic Studies at the University of California, Riverside. He studies the literatures and cultures of the medieval Iberian Peninsula. He is the author of Medieval Joke Poetry: The Cantigas d' Escarnho e de Mal Dizer (Harvard Studies in Comparative Literature, 2004), articles in Yearbook of Comparative and General Literature, Medieval Encounters, Bulletin of Hispanic Studies, La Corónica, and Nueva Revista de Filología Hispánica, as well as several book chapters. His current research considers the relationship between money and literature, the economic modes of interfaith relations in early Spanish literature, and how the circulation of money and goods among Christians, Muslims and Jews configures complex interpersonal networks and boundaries among these groups. He is also developing new research on travel literature, maps, geographical knowledge and trade routes in the Spanish Middle Ages.

 

Brian Long
Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow
Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, Canada

Brian Long is an intellectual and cultural historian whose research focuses on medical translations from Arabic into Greek and Latin, with particular attention to the works of Symeon Seth and Constantine the African, about whom he is currently preparing a monograph. He is the Latin editor of the Viaticum, Constantine the African's translation of Ibn al-Jazzar's Zad al-Musafir, and has a strong interest in digital text editing. He holds a Ph.D. in Medieval Studies from the Medieval Institute at the University of Notre Dame and is currently an Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at the Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies in Toronto; he was previously a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in the Humanities in the University of Pennsylvania's Penn Humanities Forum, a Visiting Assistant Professor of Mediterranean History at Whitman College, and a Mellon/ACLS Dissertation Completion Fellow.

 

Jeffrey Shoulson
Vice Provost for Interdisciplinary Intiatives and the Doris & Simon Konover Chair in Judaic Studies
University of Connecticut, USA

Jeffrey Shoulson was appointed Vice Provost for Interdisciplinary Initiatives in August 2017. He is also the Doris and Simon Konover Chair in Judaic Studies, and Professor of Literatures, Cultures, and Languages. Born and raised in northern New Jersey, he attended Ramaz School and Yeshivat Har Etzion before earning his AB from Princeton University, M.Phil. from the University of Cambridge, and Ph.D. from Yale University. His scholarship focuses on Jewish- Christian relations in the medieval and early modern periods, especially the ways in which Jews and Judaism are represented within Christian writings and Christianity influences or is thematized in Jewish writings. His first book, Milton and Rabbis: Hebraism, Hellenism, and Christianity, was awarded the American Academy of Jewish Research’s Salo Baron Prize. His most recent book is Fictions of Conversion: Jews, Christians, and Cultures of Change in Early Modern England. His current research project is a literary and cultural history of English Bible translations from Tyndale to the King James Version.

 

Gregory E. Sterling
Reverend Henry L. Slack Dean of Yale Divinity School &
Lillian Claus Professor of New Testament
Yale University, USA

Gregory E. Sterling is the Reverend Henry L. Slack Dean of Yale Divinity School and Lillian Claus Professor of New Testament. Sterling became dean of Yale Divinity School in 2012 after more than two decades at the University of Notre Dame, where he served in several capacities including Dean of the Graduate School.
Sterling, a New Testament scholar with a specialty in Hellenistic Judaism, concentrates his research on the writings of Philo of Alexandria, Josephus, and Luke-Acts, with a focus on the ways in which Second Temple Jews and early Christians interacted with one another and with the Greco-Roman world. Sterling is the author or editor/co-editor of seven books and more than seventy scholarly articles and essays. He is the general editor for the Philo of Alexandria Commentary Series (E.J. Brill), co-editor of the Studia Philonica Annual, and a member of the editorial board of Beihefte zur Zeitschrift für die Neutes tamentliche Wissenschaft. He served as editor of the Christianity and Judaism in Antiquity Series (University of Notre Dame Press) for twenty years.
The holder of a Ph.D. in Biblical Studies/New Testament from the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, Sterling is a minister in the Churches of Christ.

 

Jeremy Teitelbaum
Interim Provost and Executive Vice President for Academic Affairs
University of Connecticut, USA

Jeremy Teitelbaum became the University of Connecticut’s Interim Provost and Executive Vice President for Academic Affairs on February 1, 2017. He previously served for more than eight years as Dean of UConn’s College of Liberal Arts & Sciences, beginning in August 2008. He came to UConn in 2008 from the University of Illinois at Chicago, where he was Senior Associate Dean of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences and Professor of Mathematics.
A native of New York City who grew up in Denver, he earned a BA in mathematics (summa cum laude) from Carleton College and a Ph.D. in mathematics from Harvard University. He was on the faculty of the University of Michigan before joining the University of Illinois at Chicago in 1990. He is best known academically for his work in number theory, particularly a series of papers with Peter Schneider, of Münster, Germany, on the development of locally analytic representation theory.

 

Pier Tommasino
Assistant Professor of Italian
Columbia University, USA

Pier Mattia Tommasino is Assistant Professor of Italian at Columbia University. He received his Ph.D. in 2009 at the Scuola Normale Superiore, in Pisa, Italy, and he was the Francesco De Dombrowski fellow at the Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies (Villa I Tatti, Florence) in 2010-2011. His first book, L’Alcorano di Macometto: Storia di un libro del Cinquecento europeo, was published in 2013, and it will soon be published in English by the University of Pennsylvania Press, with the title The Venetian Qur’an: a Renaissance Companion to Islam. He is a member of several collaborative projects on Christian-Muslim relations, polemic, and conversion in the early modern world. With Konstantina Zanou (Department of Italian,  Columbia University), he organizes The Italian and Mediterranean Colloquium at Columbia University, a seminar on the relations between the Italian peninsula and the Mediterranean world. His current book project explores the role of Oriental studies in Florence in the second half of the 17th century.

 

Daniel Weiner
Vice President for Global Affairs and Professor of Geography
University of Connecticut, USA

Daniel Weiner joined the University of Connecticut in 2012 as Vice Provost for Global Affairs and Professor of Geography. In February 2016 he was appointed as Vice President for Global Affairs. Prior to his tenure at UConn he served four years as Executive Director of the Center for International Studies at Ohio University and 11 years as Director of the Office of International Programs at West Virginia University. Weiner received his B.A. (1979), M.A. (1981) and Ph.D. (1986) in Geography from Clark University.
In his role as Vice President, Weiner serves as the University’s senior international officer (SIO) and is responsible for the development and oversight of a wide variety of university initiatives relating to global education and institutional internationalization. His objective is to advance the University’s commitment to internationalization and facilitate the coordination among the University’s internal and external programs and initiatives.
Weiner is a development geographer with area studies expertise in eastern and southern Africa and is a specialist in the theory and practice of participatory geographic information systems. His research areas include agricultural geography, climate and society, land reform, participatory development and GIS and society. He has received 15 externally funded grants totaling over $2.5 million, published three books, 30 journal articles and 29 book chapters. Weiner has lived in Kenya, South Africa and Zimbabwe for a total of three years and has traveled widely in Africa, Asia, Europe and Latin America.

 

Joseph Ziegler
Associate Professor of History and Director of the School of History
University of Haifa, Israel

Joseph Ziegler is Associate Professor at the Department of History and the Director of the School of History at the University of Haifa. He is a graduate of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem and earned his D.Phil. from Oxford University (1994) where he studied various aspects of the relationship between medicine and religion around 1300 in the Latin West. His revised thesis was published in 1998 as a monograph entitled, Medicine and Religion c. 1300: The Case of Arnau de Vilanova. Since then, he has deepened his interest and research in this field [
most recently 'Engelbert of Admont and the Longevity of the Antediluvians c. 1300', in Summa doctrina et certa experientia. Studi su medicina e filosofia per Chiara Crisciani, ed. G. Zuccolin, Florence: SISMEL - Edizioni del Galluzzo, 2017, pp. 313-336 and 'Why Did the Patriarchs Live so Long? On the Role of the Bible in the Discourse on Longevity around 1300', Micrologus 26 (forthcoming, 2018)], but also embarked on another project, which yielded numerous articles: The Rise of Learned Physiognomy 1200-1500 in the Latin West. He is a co-editor (with Miriam Eliav-Feldon and Benjamin Isaac) of The Origins of Racism in the West, (Cambridge: CUP, 2009).