I am a historian of medieval Muslim Middle East. I am interested in how religious ideas reflect social and cultural realities, and my area of research covers the Arabic and Persian Middle East.

Hussein Fancy’s research and writing focus on the social, cultural, and intellectual history of religious interaction in the medieval Mediterranean. In particular, he is interested in projects that combine the use of Latin, Arabic, and Romance archival sources. His first book, The Mercenary Mediterranean, examined the service of Muslim soldiers from North Africa to the Christian kings of the Crown of Aragon in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. Far from marking the triumph of toleration, he argued, the alliance of Christian kings and Muslim soldiers depended on and reproduced ideas of religious difference.

I am an art historian working in the field of post-colonial museology of Islamic art. My current research examines the intersection between museums, cultural heritage, cultural representation and nationalism. I am also interested in an expanded field of Islamic art, in particular Southeast Asian Islamic art.

Ken Garden received his doctorate in Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations from the University of Chicago in 2005. He is the author of The First Islamic Reviver: Abū Hāmid al-Ghazālī and his Revival of the Religious Sciences (Oxford: 2014). His current research centers the development of Sufism in North Africa and Muslim Spain in the 12th and 13th centuries. He also has a website that presents and analyzes examples of religious discourse from different currents in contemporary Egyptian Islam.

Ph.D. candidate, History of Islamic Art, Tehran University of Art