Lancaster University

Faculty Member, History

Senior Lecturer

About

Ahlan wa-sahlan!

My academic interests have always been wide-ranging, but the core of published research focuses sharply on the medieval Mediterranean and Norman Italy. The Muslims of Medieval Italy (Edinburgh, 2009) is now out, and I'm now close to completing a comparative study of Greek, Latin and Arabic boundary definitions found in post-Norman conquest Italy for an article.

During 2011-12, I'll be on research leave working on the Arabic Documents of Norman Sicily Project at the KRC in Oxford, finalising preparations for a new critical edition of William II's bilingual (Arabic-Greek) confirmations of Muslim 'villeins' conceded to the church of S. Maria Nuova at Monreale in Sicily between 1178 and 1183. A website is being developed for the wider project:
http://krc.orient.ox.ac.uk/adns
NB still under construction.

I'm also building towards a bigger collaborative project on the use of documents as instruments of power in Norman Italy and the wider Mediterranean. If you're a researcher, a postgrad or post-doc interested in this or the topic areas listed below, please let me know what you're up to...

Research interests: 
* Wider region: anything bordering on, or somehow falling within, 'the Mediterranean basin' as might be understood in the widest possible sense.
* Regions of particular interest: Sicily; Italy; North Africa; Iberian Peninsula; Egypt; Syria-Palestine; Italian maritime states.
* Prinicpal research themes: political; diplomatic; administrative; linguistic; socio-economic; socio-religious.
* Topics: State formation and disintegration in and around the Mediterranean; political thought and ideologies; rulership; administration; law, society and government; holy war and crusade; inter-faith relations; religious conversion and assimilation; cross-cultural contacts in Muslim-Christian frontier zones.
* Sources: mainly charters and narrative histories (Arabic, Greek and Latin)

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