Related Research Articles
Sankoré Madrasa is one of three medieval mosques and centres of learning located in Timbuktu, Mali, the others being the Djinguereber and Sidi Yahya mosques. Founded in the 14th century, the Sankoré mosque went through multiple periods of patronage and renovation under both the Mali Empire and the Songhai Empire until its decline following the Battle of Tondibi in 1591. The mosque developed into a madrasa, reaching its peak in the 16th century. The term "University of Sankoré" has sometimes been applied to the Sankoré madrasa, though there is no evidence of a centralized teaching institution such as the term university implies. Instead the mosque served as the focal point for individual scholars with their own private students, and as a location in which some lectures and classes were held.
Patricia Crone was a Danish historian specialising in early Islamic history. Crone was a member of the Revisionist school of Islamic studies and questioned the historicity of the Islamic traditions about the beginnings of Islam.
Fred McGraw Donner is a scholar of Islam and Peter B. Ritzma Professor of Near Eastern History at the University of Chicago. He has published several books about early Islamic history.
Norman Arthur Stillman, also Noam, is an American academic, historian, and Orientalist, serving as the emeritus Schusterman-Josey Professor and emeritus Chair of Judaic History at the University of Oklahoma. He specializes in the intersection of Jewish and Islamic culture and history, and in Oriental and Sephardi Jewry, with special interest in the Jewish communities in North Africa. His major publications are The Jews of Arab Lands: a History And Source Book and Sephardi Religious Responses to Modernity. In the last few years, Stillman has been the executive editor of the "Encyclopedia of Jews in the Islamic World", a project that includes over 2000 entries in 5 volumes.
Joel Beinin is Donald J. McLachlan Professor of History and professor of Middle East history at Stanford University. From 2006 to 2008 he served as director of Middle East studies and professor of history at the American University in Cairo.
Michael Bonner was a Jewish scholar of Islamic studies. He received his PhD in Near Eastern studies from Princeton in 1987. He was a professor of medieval Islamic history at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, where he served as chair of the department of Near Eastern Studies from 2010 to 2019. In addition to his monographs, he published dozens of scholarly articles and translations.
John Victor Tolan is a historian of religious and cultural relations between the Arab and Latin-speaking civilizations of the Middle Ages.
Mark R. Cohen is an American scholar of Jewish history in the Muslim world.
Jane Dammen McAuliffe is an American educator, scholar of Islam and the inaugural director of national and international outreach at the Library of Congress.
Simon E. Gikandi is a Kenyan Literature Professor and Postcolonial scholar. He is the Class of 1943 University Professor of English at Princeton University. He is perhaps best known for his co-editorship of The Cambridge History of African and Caribbean Literature. He has also done important work on the modern African novel, and two distinguished African novelists: Chinua Achebe and Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o. In 2019 he became the president of the Modern Language Association.
Matthew Restall is a historian of Colonial Latin America. He is an ethnohistorian, a Mayanist, a scholar of the conquest, colonization, and the African diaspora in the Americas, and a historian of popular music. Restall has areas of specialization in Yucatán and Mexico, Guatemala, and Belize. He is a member of the New Philology school of colonial Mexican history and the founder of a related school, the New Conquest History. He is currently Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of Latin American History and Anthropology, and Director of Latin American Studies, at the Pennsylvania State University. He is a former president of the American Society for Ethnohistory (2017–18), a former editor of Ethnohistory journal (2007–17), a former senior editor of the Hispanic American Historical Review (2017–22), editor of the book series Latin American Originals, and co-editor of the Cambridge Latin American Studies book series. He also writes books on the history of popular music.
The Professor Robert W. Hamilton Book Author Award is presented annually to the best book-length publication by a staff or faculty member of the University of Texas at Austin. It is chosen by a committee of various disciplines, who in turn were chosen by the Vice President for Research at the University of Texas at Austin.
Toyin Omoyeni Falola is a Nigerian historian and professor of African Studies. Falola is a Fellow of the Historical Society of Nigeria and of the Nigerian Academy of Letters, and has served as the president of the African Studies Association. He is currently the Jacob and Frances Sanger Mossiker Chair in the Humanities at the University of Texas at Austin.
Ato Quayson is a Ghanaian literary critic and Professor of English at Stanford University where he acts as the current chair of the department. He is also the chair of the newly established Department of African and African American Studies. He was formerly a Professor of English at New York University (NYU), and before that was University Professor of English and inaugural Director of the Centre for Diaspora Studies at the University of Toronto. His writings on African literature, postcolonial studies, disability studies, urban studies and in literary theory have been widely published. He is a Fellow of the Ghana Academy of Arts and Sciences (2006) and the Royal Society of Canada (2013), and in 2019 was elected Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy. He was Chief Examiner in English of the International Baccalaureate (2005–07), and has been a member of the Diaspora and Migrations Project Committee of the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) of the UK, and the European Research Council award grants panel on culture and cultural production (2011–2017). He is a former President of the African Studies Association.
Carole Boyce Davies is a Caribbean-American professor of Africana Studies and English at Cornell University, the author of the prize-winning Left of Karl Marx: The Political Life of Claudia Jones (2008) and Black Women, Writing and Identity: Migrations of the Subject (1994), as well as editor of several critical anthologies in African and Caribbean literature. She is currently the Frank H. T. Rhodes Professor of Humane Letters, an endowed chair named after the 9th president of Cornell University. Among several other awards, she was the recipient of two major awards, both in 2017: the Frantz Fanon Lifetime Achievement Award from the Caribbean Philosophical Association and the Distinguished Africanist Award from the New York State African Studies Association.
Amy Singer is a Professor of Ottoman and Islamic History at Brandeis University. Her major research areas are agrarian relations, philanthropy, and the city of Edirne.
Akinwumi Ogundiran is the Cardiss Collins Professor of Arts and Sciences and Professor of History at Northwestern University. He is an archaeologist, anthropologist, and cultural historian, whose research focuses on the Yoruba world of western Africa, Atlantic Africa, and the African Diaspora. He was born in Ibadan, Nigeria, and migrated to the United States in 1993. He was Chancellor's Professor and Professor of Africana Studies, Anthropology & History at UNC Charlotte.
Attitudes of medieval Arabs to Black people varied over time and individual attitude, but tended to be negative. Though the Qur'an expresses no racial prejudice, ethnocentric prejudice towards black people is widely evident among medieval Arabs, for a variety of reasons: Arabs' extensive conquests and slave trade; the influence of Aristotelian ideas regarding slavery, which some Muslim philosophers directed towards Zanj; and the influence of Judeo-Christian ideas regarding divisions among humankind. On the other hand, the Afro-Arab author Al-Jahiz, himself having a Zanj grandfather, wrote a book entitled Superiority of the Blacks to the Whites, and explained why the Zanj were black in terms of environmental determinism in the "On the Zanj" chapter of The Essays.
Martin A. Klein is an Africanist and an emeritus professor in the History Department at the University of Toronto specialising in the Atlantic slave trade, and francophone West Africa: Senegal, Guinea, and Mali. He obtained a Bachelor of Arts degree in journalism at Northwestern University (1951-1955) and a Master of Arts and Doctor of Philosophy in history at the University of Chicago (1957-1964). Klein worked as an assistant professor at the University of California Berkeley from 1965 till 1970, later teaching African history at the University of Toronto as an associate professor and later full professor from 1970 until his retirement in 1999. As a Fulbright Fellow, Klein taught for a year at Lovanium University in Kinshasa.
African Dominion: A New History of Empire in Early and Medieval West Africa, by Michael A. Gomez, focuses on the regions surrounding the Middle Niger Valley. It can be thought of as tracing the rise and fall of empire as a form of local political organization in West Africa, culminating in the Songhay Empire; thus it primarily covers the millennium from the mid-sixth century to 1591 CE, when Songhay came under Moroccan rule. It has been particularly noted for using a wide range of non-European sources, particularly Arabic-language material, to develop a non-Eurocentric account of medieval West African history.