Prof. Dr. Abigail Balbale
Profile
Abigail Krasner Balbale is Assistant Professor of Islamic History in the Department of Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies at New York University. Balbale teaches and researches at the intersection of history, art history and Islamic studies, bringing together written, visual and material sources alongside theoretical frameworks to explore the history of the Islamic Middle Period. She received her PhD in History and Middle Eastern Studies from Harvard in 2012, and previously taught at Bard Graduate Center and the University of Massachusetts Boston. She has published articles on jihad and holy war ideology, the art and architecture of the Almohad dynasty, the historiography of al-Andalus, and Arabic amulets and coinage, as well as co-edited two books, Justice and Leadership in Early Islamic Courts (Harvard, 2017) and Spanning the Strait: Studies in Unity in the Western Mediterranean (Brill, 2013). With Jerrilynn Dodds and María Rosa Menocal she co-authored the prize-winning book The Arts of Intimacy: Christians, Jews and Muslims in the Making of Castilian Culture (Yale, 2008). She is the recipient of a 2018 National Endowment for the Humanities fellowship, and has previously been awarded grants from the Medieval Academy of America, ACLS and the Mellon Foundation.