Concubines and Courtesans

Edited by Matthew S. Gordon, Professor of History, Miami University, and Edited by Kathryn A. Hain, PhD candidate in Middle Eastern History, University of Utah

Matthew S. Gordon is Professor of History at Miami University. He has written widely on Islamic and Middle East history. He is the author of Civilizations: Past and Present and co-author of The Rise of Islam and Understanding Islam.

Kathryn A. Hain is a PhD candidate in Middle Eastern History at the University of Utah. She came to academia after seventeen years serving the church in Jerusalem and Amman.

Betül Ipsirli Argit is associate professor at Marmara University where she teaches Ottoman history. She completed her Ph.D dissertation at Bo?aziçi University in 2009. She is the author of Rabia Gülnu? Emetullah Valide Sultan (1640-1715), a book project supported by a post-doctoral TUB?TAK Fellowship. Her main areas of research are early modern Ottoman history, history of women in the Ottoman Empire, material culture and history of the Ottoman imperial court.

Michael Dann is assistant professor in the Department of Religion at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. His research interests center on sectarian boundaries, hadith literature and historiography in classical and modern Islamic thought. He is currently preparing a book manuscript on the reception of Shi'ite hadith narrators in Sunni literature.

Heather Empey is currently a librarian at the NATO Defense College in Rome, Italy. Her forthcoming Ph.D. dissertation is entitled, "The Almohad Murshidah: Genealogy and Transmission of a Muslim Creed," and her research interests include medieval Muslim historiography, Islamic theology and the history of warfare.

Matthew S. Gordon is professor of Middle East and Islamic history at Miami University (Oxford, Ohio). His publications include The Breaking of a Thousand Swords: A History of the Turkish Military of Samarra, The Rise of Islam and a series of articles on gender and slavery in early Islamic society. He is co-editor of the Ya`qubi Translation Project and, with Antoine Borrut, an editor of the online journal, al-Usur al-Wusta.

Kathryn Hain earned her Ph.D. from the University of Utah (2016). Her research interests include the social history of power machinations within the harem, and the slave trade of European concubines and eunuchs in the Middle East, India, and China.

Usman Hamid is a Ph.D. candidate at the Department of Near and Middle Eastern Civilizations at the University of Toronto. His doctoral dissertation explores the intersections of rituals, relics, memory, and sacred space in the context of north Indian Muslims' pilgrimage to the Hijaz during the Mughal period. In addition to concubinage, his other research on slavery focuses on the history of eunuchs in sixteenth century north India.

Younus Y. Mirza is assistant professor of Islamic Studies at Allegheny College. His recent publications include "Was Ibn Kathir the Spokesperson for Ibn Taymiyya" in the Journal of Qur'anic Studies and "Ishmael as Abraham's Sacrifice: Ibn Taymiyya and Ibn Kathir on the Intended Victim" in Islam Christian-Muslim Relations. His research focuses on Islamic movements, marriage and sexuality in Islam, Qur'anic exegesis, and hadith.

Pernilla Myrne is associate professor in classical Arabic literature at University of Gothenburg, Sweden. Her research interests include the representation of women in Abbasid literature and premodern Arabic erotic literature. Among her publications are "Discussing ghayra in ?Abb?sid literature: Jealousy as a Manly Virtue or Sign of Mutual Affection," (2014) and "Who was Hubba al-Madiniyya?" (2015). She is currently working on a monograph on medieval Arabic-Islamic representations of women's sexuality.

Lisa Nielson is the Anisfield-Wolf SAGES Fellow at Case Western Reserve University. She is an historical musicologist whose research interests include the intersections of gender, slavery and music in the early Islamicate courts. Among her publications are "Gender and the Politics of Music in the Early Islamic Courts" in Early Music History.

Cristina de la Puente is Scientific Researcher, Department of Jewish and Islamic Studies of the Instituto de Lenguas y Culturas del Mediterráneo (ILC, CSIC) and Vice President for Scientific and Technical Research at the Spanish National Council. Her publications include Avenzoar, Averroes, Ibn al-Jatib: médicos de al-Andalus, perfumes, ungüentos y jarabes (2003), El banquete de las palabras : la alimentación de los textos árabes (2005), and Judaísmo e islam, with Paloma Díaz-Más (2007). Her research fields include Islamic law in the western Muslim world, Islamic theology, the transmission of Muslim traditions and popular religiosity, and the history of al-Andalus.

Dwight F. Reynolds is professor of Arabic language and literature in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He is the editor and co-author of The Cambridge Companion to Modern Arab Culture and Interpreting the Self: Autobiography in the Arabic Literary Tradition, as well as author of Arab Folklore: A Handbook and numerous articles on music in medieval Muslim Spain.

Majied Robinson received his PhD in 2014 and is a Leverhulme Early Career Research Fellow at Edinburgh University. His primary research interests are in the Arab genealogical literary tradition and the application of statistical and computer sciences methodologies to early Islamic history.

Nerina Rustomji is associate professor of History at St. John's University (Queens, New York). She is the author of The Garden and the Fire: Heaven and Hell in Islamic Culture and the forthcoming Beauty of the Houri: Heavenly Virgins, Earthly Jihad, and the Feminine Models of Islam.

Jocelyn Sharlet is associate professor of Comparative Literature at the University of California, Davis. Her publications include "Chaste Lovers, Umayyad Rulers and Abbasid Writers" in Courts and Performance in the Pre-modern Middle East, ed. Maurice Pomerantz and Evelyn Birge Vitz (in press); "Arabic Praise Poems" in Oxford Bibliographies in Islamic Studies (in press); and Patronage and Poetry in the Islamic World: Social Mobility and Status in the Medieval Middle East and Central Asia, which received an honourable mention of the British-Kuwait Friendship Society Book Prize (2012). She works on classical Arabic poetry and prose literature.
Marina Tolmacheva is professor of History at Washington State University and President Emerita of American University of Kuwait. Her research interests range from Islamic geography and travel to historiography of the Islamic periphery and medieval women's history.

Elizabeth Urban is assistant professor of the Islamic world at West Chester University of Pennsylvania. Her publications include "Abu Bakra: Mawla of the Prophet or Polemical Tool?" (2012) and "The Foundations of Islamic Society as Expressed by the Qur'anic Term Mawl?" (2013). Her research treats the intersection of slavery, gender, family structures, and political power in the early Islamic empire, which she will explore in her forthcoming monograph, Conquered Populations in Early Islam: Non-Arabs, Slaves, and the Sons of Slave Mothers.