Uriel Simonsohn, PhD

I'm a historian of the early and medieval Islamic Near East (or Middle East, the Levant, the western Orient, western Asia, etc.). My research is primarily concerned with Muslim – non-Muslim relations across a variety of social and cultural spheres. Over the past years I have dealt much with questions pertaining to conversion to Islam and religiously-mixed families.

 

I recently completed Female Power and Religious Change in the Medieval Near East (forthcoming, OUP), which is about women as agents of religious change in the context of religiously-mixed families during the first few centuries following the rise of Islam.

 

I was the co-organizer of a research group at the Israel Institute for Advanced Studies in Jerusalem on cultural brokerage in pre-modern Islam (https://iias.huji.ac.il/cultural-brokerage-pre-modern-islam) and of a group on kinship and community in medieval Islam, in the framework of the Haifa Center for Mediterranean History (https://hcmh.haifa.ac.il/index.php/academic-activity/research-groups/16-academic-activity/118-kinship-and-community-in-the-early-and-medieval-islamic-mediterranean).

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Professional bio:

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I received my PhD from Princeton University in 2008, after which I became a post-doctoral fellow at the Institute for Religious Studies at Leiden University (2008-2010) and a fellow of the Martin Buber Society of Fellows at Hebrew University (2010-2013). I have been a research fellow at the Center of Excellence at the University of Konstanz (2016), a scholar-in-residence of the Helen Gartner Hammer Program at the Hadassah-Brandeis Institute (2017), a visiting fellow at Wolfson College, University of Oxford (2019), and a fellow at the Israel Institute for Advanced Studies (2019-2020). I was also a member of the I-Core Center for the Study of Conversion and Inter-Religious Encounters at Ben Gurion University (2013-2018), and at present I serve as head of the Haifa Laboratory for Religious Studies.