During the High Middle Ages, the city of Verona in Northern Italy stood at the geographic, political, and social crossroads of imperial and papal power. However, during the first half of the thirteenth century, Lord Ezzelino da Romano’s affiliation with the Holy Roman Emperor, F…
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This dissertation is about the transformation of an African pastoral system, involving the intertwined processes of intensification and individualization. The intensification of the pastoral system is a response to the disappearance of rangelands, and has led to a significant in…
This dissertation is an examination of Queen Melisende's piety, power, and patronage in the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem of the twelfth century. The principal sources used to assess her reign are William of Tyre's A History of the Deeds Done Beyond the Sea and the royal charters i…
The dissertation that follows is an historical investigation into Egyptian Jewish society of the thirteenth century and the legacy of its paramount leader, Abraham Maimonides (1186-1237). The dawn of the thirteenth century witnessed great transformations and upheavals in Egypt, …
Based on ethnographic fieldwork, textual analysis, and data culled from interviews, this manuscript explores how Islamic ethics shape the epistemic approaches of Muslim intellectuals to liberal democracy and corollary paradigms of western modernity. Specifically, it examines a c…
This dissertation is an ethnographic analysis of a newly emergent religious movement among women in urban Cairo that is part of the broader Islamic resurgence in contemporary Egypt. In this movement, women from a wide cross-section of the society are vigorously engaged in the te…
Over the past decade, the Israeli political landscape has been transformed by the rise of the Sephardic Torah Guardians (Shas). Drawing upon a constituency of "traditional" and "ultra-orthodox" Middle Eastern Jews, Shas has succeeded in bringing groups previously marginalized by…
“Every Man is Now in the Market” is a study of informal institutional change in medieval Liguria during the second half of the thirteenth century. Informal institutions are social rules that are enforced by commonly held values and norms, rather than by any law. The goal of this…
This dissertation undertakes an examination of conceptions of human equality in Islamic law. The dissertation uses the history of slavery and its abolition in several Muslim locales as a vehicle for uncovering juridical and sociolegal factors that play a role in shaping ideas ab…
In 203/818, 'Ali b. Musa al-Rid[dotbelow]a, eighth Shi`i Imam and heir apparent of the `Abbasid caliph al-Ma`mun, passed away in the Iranian province of Tus. Mashhad, the place of his burial, emerged as a site of visitation during the late tenth century, and assumed increasing i…
This dissertation presents a discussion of home-based Islamic study circles among Muslim communities in New York City. It explores the importance of study circles as critical sites for the learning and development of what it means to "be Muslim" when living in a Western, non-Mus…
The main question of this dissertation is how Islamic identity is defined and contested in the expressive culture and what the term "Islam" comes to mean in different economic, political, and social situations in Indonesia. In the era of capitalism, since the New Order promotes …
This dissertation contributes to the growing scholarship attempting to analyze and understand devout religious engagement, and to cull from its study insights about human motivation, complexity and desire. It considers the lives, goals and activities of pious Muslim women in Cai…
This dissertation addresses a range of questions about language and the body through an ethnographic study of cassette-sermons in Egypt. Three dimensions of cassette-sermon practice were central to my project. First, I examined cassette-sermon listening as an ethical exercise ai…
The dissertation explores the lives of educated, urban, Bangladeshi women who come together in religious discussion circles, known as Talim, Tafsir, Islam class, Dars and Quran class , to learn about the Quran and Hadith, and to strive towards a life where Islam has a greater pr…
This dissertation, based on ethnographic research in Yogyakarta, Central Java, Indonesia, explores how Muslims are negotiating what it means to be "modern" in the contemporary world. Focusing primarily on the experiences of young women, it looks at competing discourses of gender…
Based upon twenty-two months of ethnographic research in the southern suburbs of Beirut, this dissertation describes how Islamist Shi'i Muslims engage with and deploy various discourses of the modern, presenting themselves as piously modern. In this community, spiritual progress…