MOHAMAD BALLAN
Assistant Professor (Ph.D., University of Chicago, 2019)
Curriculum Vitae
Office: SBS N-321
Email: mohamad.ballan@stonybrook.edu
Interests: Medieval Mediterranean; borderlands and frontier history; political thought; Islamic history; medieval Iberia; sectarianism and intercommunal relations; early modern Europe; intellectual networks; philosophy of history; historiography; Ottoman Empire; late antiquity.
My research focuses on the intellectual, political and cultural history of the Mediterranean world, with a focus on late medieval and early modern Spain. The core themes of my research are borderlands, mobility, and scholarly practices in the premodern world. My work closely examines intellectual networks, the transformation of institutions during moments of crisis and transition, the role of borderlands in fashioning identity and difference, the centrality of migration and cultural change in human history, and the importance of medieval and early modern literary representation and historiographical production in shaping modern understandings of the past.
My first book, The Politics of Sovereignty in the Medieval Islamic West: The World of Lisan al-Din ibn al-Khatib (forthcoming with Oxford University Press), explores the interplay between crisis and efflorescence, political fragmentation and intellectual innovation in the late medieval Mediterranean world. The book examines the phenomenon of the “scholar-statesman”—litterateurs, physicians, and jurists who ascended to the highest administrative and executive offices of state—in late medieval Islamic Spain and North Africa. The Politics of Sovereignty provides a new reading of the history of the Nasrid kingdom of Granada (1238–1492) that examines these issues by closely studying the life and works of Lisan al-Din ibn al-Khatib (1313–1374), the most prominent Spanish Muslim historian, chancellor and philosopher during the fourteenth century.
My next major book project, tentatively titled From Mudéjars to Moriscos, which studies the social, cultural and intellectual history of Granada’s Muslim populace in the lead-up and aftermath of the Spanish Christian conquest of the city in 1492. Drawing upon a wealth of Arabic, Spanish, Latin, and Aljamiado manuscripts and archival sources, this project examines the multitude of theological, legal, and political discourses about this community, the largest Muslim minority residing under Christian rule in the premodern era, in order to contribute to scholarly conversations about religious minorities, conversion, diaspora, hybridity and migration in the early modern Islamic world. It seeks to shed new light on the history of Iberian Muslims and Moriscos by examining how their writings were fashioned by forced conversion, exile, and their evolving relationship with the Ottoman Empire between the fifteenth and seventeenth centuries.
I offer courses on the histories, societies and cultures of Europe, the Mediterranean and the Islamic world from Late Antiquity to the Early Modern period. My classes emphasize the interconnected histories of Europe, Africa and Asia during the medieval and early modern era (ca. 500-1800), while exploring the larger issues of mobility, commerce, sovereignty, identity, cross-cultural contact and cosmopolitanism in world history. The graduate and undergraduate courses that I teach include:
- HIS 235. Heirs of Rome: The Early Medieval World, 300–1000
- HIS 236. The World of the Later Middle Ages, 1000-1500
- HIS 301. The Medieval Mediterranean
- HIS 307. Silk Roads and Spice Routes: Travel, Exploration and Discovery in the Premodern World
- HIS 390. Crossroad of Civilizations: The World of Medieval Spain, 500-1500
- HIS 401. The Medieval Middle East
- HIS 501. Medieval and Early Modern Europe
- HIS 516. Empire, Kingship and Sovereignty in World History
PERSONAL WEBSITE
https://ballandalus.wordpress.com/
SELECTED WORK
“‘The Jews of this Nation’: The Co-production of Sectarian Identity in the Fatimid Caliphate, ca. 1120” in David Nirenberg and Katharina Heyden (eds.), The Co-production of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam: Artefacts, Rituals, Communities, Narratives, Doctrines, Concepts (Turnhout: Brepols, 2025)
"Fraxinetum: An Islamic Frontier State in Tenth-Century Provence," Comitatus: A Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies 41 (2010): 23-76
PUBLIC SCHOLARSHIP
“The Nasrid College: Knowledge and Power in a Medieval Islamic City-State,” Medieval Studies
Research Blog, April 27, 2022.
"Muslim Refugees in Medieval Malta (ca. 1463)? Mobility, Migration and the Muslim-Christian Frontier in the Mediterranean World," Medieval Studies Research Blog, October 13, 2021.
“A Connected World: Exploring the Early Middle Ages with Ibn Fadlan,” The Library of Arabic Literature Blog
Interview with Ottoman History Podcast for The Early Modern Islamic World
Interview with Ottoman History Podcast Legacies of al-Andalus
“Modern Monuments and Medieval Mythologies: The Statue of Avengalvón in Burgos, Spain”
“Portraits of Moroccan Ambassadors in Early Modern England”
“27 Prominent Medieval Andalusi Women”
“An Andalusi Mudéjar in 14th-c. Constantinople: The Travels of Ibn al-Sabbah”
“Bibliography of Translated Texts from Medieval/Early Modern Iberia and North Africa”
“Majrit/Mayrit: The Andalusi Muslim Heritage of Medieval Madrid”
“The Royal Edict of Expulsion (1609) and the Last Andalusi Muslims (“Moriscos”) of Spain”
“Mongol-Papal Encounter: Letter Exchange between Pope Innocent IV and Güyük Khan in 1245-1246”