Description:

A hybrid (in-person and livestream) symposium on the history of the Mamluk Sultanate in honor of Carl Petry, the Hamad ibn Khalifa Al Thani Professor of Middle East Studies and Professor of History, who retired in the summer of 2021 after 47 years on the faculty. The symposium brings together three leading Mamlukists who will present their cutting-edge research on Egypt and Syria from the 13th to 16th centuries to a general audience. 

Speakers and presentations:

Frédéric Bauden
“Studying the diplomatic contacts between Italy, Aragon and the Mamluk Sultanate (mid-13th-early 16th c.): About the DiplomatiCon project.”

Frédéric Bauden is professor at the University of Liège (Belgium) where he holds the Chair of Arabic Language, Islamic Studies and Islamic Art since 2001. A specialist of the Mamluk Sultanate, he has published articles and books mainly dealing with history and historiography. Together with Marlis Saleh (University of Chicago) and Antonella Ghersetti (University of Venice), he founded the School of Mamluk Studies in 2014. He is associate editor of Mamluk Studies Review and editor of the Bibliotheca Maqrizana (Brill). Since January 2022, he leads the DiplomatiCon project.

Yossef Rapoport
“The great Arab uprisings in Upper Egypt, 1250 – 1350”

Yossef Rapoport is professor in Islamic History at Queen Mary University London, with research focus on the social, cultural and legal history of Egypt and Syria under Fatimid, Ayyubid and Mamluk rule.  Publications include Lost Maps of the Caliphs: Drawing the World in Eleventh-Century Cairo, co-authored with Emilie Savage-Smith (University of Chicago Press, 2018), Islamic Maps (Bodleian Library, 2019), and Rural Economy and Tribal Society in Islamic Egypt (Brepols, 2018), recipient of the Middle East Medievalists association book prize. 

Bethany Walker
“A Tale of Three Villages: Archaeological Perspectives on Peasant Life, Migration, and Resource Management in Late Medieval Syria”

Bethany Walker (PhD 1998, University of Toronto) is Professor of Islamic Archaeology at the University of Bonn, and former Co-Speaker of the Annemarie Schimmel Kolleg of Mamluk Studies.  A historically trained archaeologist and ceramicist, Walker directs multiple archaeological projects in Israel and Jordan, and is a Board member of the American Center of Research in Amman. Among her monographs and edited and co-edited works are Jordan in the Late Middle Ages: Transformation of the Mamluk Frontier (Chicago, 2011), Reflections of Empire: Archaeological and Ethnographic Studies on the Pottery of the Ottoman Levant, (Boston 2009), Living with Nature and Things: Contributions to a New Social History of the Middle Islamic Periods (Bonn, 2020), and the Oxford Handbook of Islamic Archaeology (Oxford, 2020). She is the senior and founding editor of the Journal of Islamic Archaeology and co-editor of Equinox’s Monographs in Islamic Archaeology series. Her research focuses on peasant society, land use and tenure, and landscape transformation.