MOHAMAD BALLAN
Assistant Professor |
PhD, University of Chicago, 2019 |
Office: Social & Behavioral Sciences - Level 3, Room S-321 |
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
Bio:
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.
Recent Courses:
Undergraduate
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
Graduate
HIS 501 Medieval and Early Modern Europe
HIS 516 Empire, Kingship and Sovereignty in World History
Select Works:
“‘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. Read the article.
“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.] Read the article.
"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. Read the article.
"Fraxinetum: An Islamic Frontier State in Tenth-Century Provence," Comitatus: A Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies 41 (2010): 23-76. Read the article.
“The Nasrid College: Knowledge and Power in a Medieval Islamic City-State,” Medieval Studies Research Blog, April 27, 2022. Read the article.
“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. Read the article.
“A Connected World: Exploring the Early Middle Ages with Ibn Fadlan,” The Library of Arabic Literature Blog. Read the article.
Interview with Ottoman History Podcast for The Early Modern Islamic World. Listen to the episode.
Interview with Ottoman History Podcast Legacies of al-Andalus. Listen to the episode.