Mohamad Ballan

Bio:

Read Dr. Mohamad Ballan's CV

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 Mediterranean Entanglements: Migration, Conversion and the Making of Race in the Ibero-African Borderlands, 1300-1600, provides a nuanced exploration of borderlands, conversion and migration by examining lineage as a meaningful and important category in structuring the process of racialization. Genealogical notions of distinction underpinned the emergence of new discriminations which claimed explicitly to be rooted in natural realities and found their clearest and most institutionalized expression in the idea of “purity of blood” (limpieza de sangre) in Christian Iberia. During the same period, “Arabness” (ʿurūbiyyah) served as an important idiom for the articulation of Islamic identity. These were both exclusionary discourses of power that sought to secure the political authority and social status of elites on the basis of lineage. The forced baptisms of Andalusi Muslims in Castile in 1501-1502 constitutes a critical point of departure for thinking about these questions of migration, religious identity and the formation of political community. This book illustrates how medieval ideas about lineage, environment and religion shaped the construction of racialized difference during a moment of increased convergence between Iberia, North Africa and West Africa in the fifteenth and sixteenth 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. 

I look forward to the opportunity to work with graduate students interested in the borderlands, cross-cultural encounters, mobility and migration, and intellectual history in the medieval and early modern world.

Select Works:

“Rebels and Renegades: Ibn al-Khatib and the Christians of Medieval Granada” in
Thomas Barton (ed.), Ethno-Religious Interaction in Premodern Iberia, North Africa, and
Beyond (Turnhout: Brepols, 2026), 127‒172.

“‘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), 155‒184. 

“Borderland Anxieties: Lisān al-Dīn ibn al-Khaṭīb (d. 1374) and the Politics of Genealogy in Late Medieval Granada,” Speculum Volume 98, Number 2 (April 2023): 447-495 [Received the 2025 Medieval Academy of America Article Prize in Critical Race Studies.] 

"Genealogía, linaje e identidad etnocultural en la Granada nazarí,” in Mercedes García-Arenal and Felipe Pereda (eds.), De sangre y leche: Raza y religión en el mundo ibérico moderno (Madrid: Marcial Pons, 2021), 39‒70. 

"Fraxinetum: An Islamic Frontier State in Tenth-Century Provence," Comitatus: A Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies 41 (2010): 23-76. 

“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 on The Early Modern Islamic World. 

Interview with Ottoman History Podcast on Legacies of al-Andalus.