New York, New York, March 18, 2015 —Bard Graduate Center is pleased to announce that Abigail Krasner Balbale will join its faculty as assistant professor of Islamic Art and Material Culture on July 1, 2015. “After many years of searching,” said Dean Peter N. Miller, “we are delighted to have so successfully concluded our efforts to permanently establish the study of Islamic material culture in our curriculum with a scholar trained as a historian of Christian as well as Muslim Europe, of Iberia as well as North Africa, and of texts as well as artifacts.”
Dr. Balbale, who was most recently assistant professor of medieval Mediterranean History at the University of Massachusetts Boston, received her undergraduate degree in 2003 from Yale and her PhD in History and Middle Eastern Studies in 2012 from Harvard, where she focused on the cultural history of medieval Iberia and North Africa. From 2012 to 2014, she was Bard Graduate Center’s Postdoctoral Fellow in Islamic Art and Material Culture. She is the co-author, with Jerrilynn Dodds and María Rosa Menocal, of the award-winning book, The Arts of Intimacy: Christians, Jews and Muslims in the Making of Castilian Culture (Yale, 2008). Her current project is tentatively entitled “Wolf King of Glorious Memory: Alliance, Accommodation and Resistance in Ibn Mardanīsh’s al-Andalus.” Among her recent work, which has been supported by Fulbright, National Endowment for the Humanities, American Council of Learned Societies, and Mellon fellowships, are a co-edited volume, Spanning the Strait: Studies in Unity in the Western Mediterranean (Brill, 2013), an article on jihad as a legitimation tactic in thirteenth-century al-Andalus, and an essay on the Berber dynasties of the Islamic far west in A Companion to Islamic Art and Architecture, edited by Finbarr Barry Flood and Gülru Necipoğlu (Wiley-Blackwell, forthcoming).
