Campus Directory

Division Humanities Division

Department/College/Unit Literature Department

Title Associate Professor of Mediterranean Studies

Affiliation Faculty

Other UCSC Campus Affiliation Legal Studies

Faculty Type Regular Faculty

Areas of Expertise Middle Ages
Mediterranean Studies
Middle East Studies
Legal Studies

Primary Office Location Humanities Building 1
Room 642

Office Hours for Students/ Office Hours Fall 2023 Thursdays 1:15-2:15 pm or by appointment

Mail Stop Humanities Academic Services

Biography, Education and Training

I specialize in the cultures, history, and literatures of the medieval and early modern western Mediterranean. My book, Law and the Islamization of Morocco under the Almoravids: the Fatwās of Ibn Rushd al-Jadd to the Far Maghrib, analyzes a group of legal consultative texts between Cordoba and the Far Maghrib (what is today Morocco) and argues that legal institutions developed in the latter in response to the social needs of growing urban spaces and the administrative needs of the first Berber-Islamic empire. I am currently working on a second book-length project on the social and cultural history of the reception of displaced populations in the medieval and early modern western Mediterranean: a history of the refugees of the "reconquista." I also translate modern Arabic literature and have written on modern topics including legal reform in Morocco and Egypt.

I received my PhD in Medieval Studies from Yale in 2009. After a two-year dissertation writing fellowship at Willamette University in, Salem, Oregon, I spent five years teaching in the Department of Arab and Islamic Civilizations at the American University in Cairo.

Summary of Expertise

Medieval Mediterranean; Spain and North Africa; Arabic Literature; Islamic Law and Society

Selected Publications

• The Almoravid Maghrib. Past Imperfect. Leeds: Arc Humanities Press, 2023.
• Law and the Islamization of Morocco under the Almoravids: The Fatwās of Ibn Rushd al-Jadd to the Far Maghrib. Leiden: Brill, 2014.
• "The Islamic Roots of Spanish Protocols of Possession: The Requerimiento as Dialogue of Legal-Political Cultures with a Missing Interlocutor." In Empire and Exceptionalism: The Requerimiento and Claims of Sovereignty in the Early Modern Mediterranean and the Atlantic, a special forum of Republics of Letters: A Journal for the Study of Knowledge, Politics, and the Arts 5, no. 3 (February 2018). 
• "Interactions between North Africa and Spain, Medieval and Early Modern," In The Oxford Research Encyclopedia of African History. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018.
• "Exile, Encounter, and the Articulation of Andalusī Identity in the Maghrib." Medieval Encounters 20 (2014), 341-352
• "The Ransom Industry and the Expectation of Refuge on the Western Mediterranean Muslim–Christian Frontier, 1085–1350". In The Articulation of Power in Medieval Iberia and the Maghrib. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014, 217-232.
• “Fragments.” (On María Rosa Menocal’s intellectual contributions to the field). Journal of Medieval Iberian Studies (2013) Vol. 5, No. 2, 129 – 133.
• "Spanning the Strait: Studies in Unity in the Western Mediterranean." Eds. Yuen-Gen Liang, Abigail Krasner Balbale, Andrew Devereux, and Camilo Gómez-Rivas. Medieval Encounters 14 (2013).
• “Qadi Iyad.” In Islamic Legal Thought: A Compendium of Muslim Jurists, edited by Oussama Arabi, David S. Powers, and Susan Spectorsky, Studies in Islamic Law and Society Vol. 36, 323-338. Leiden: Brill, 2013.
• “Las Navas de Tolosa, the Urban Transformation of the Maghrib, and the Territorial Decline of al-Andalus.” Journal of Medieval Iberian Studies 4, no. 1 (2012): 27-32.