University of Barcelona

Associate Professor, Masters Program, "Historia de las Religiones", Departament de Filologia Griega

Other Affiliations: CSIC (Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas-Spanish National Research Council), Department of Medieval Studies

About

I study the cultural history of religions in Medieval Iberia, the Maghreb, and more broadly, in the Mediterranean, focusing especially on how religion informs communal identities and social relations and interactions among Muslims, Christians, and Jews, and on how religion shapes the discourses about identity and inter-communal relations. My interests move in two broad and sometimes overlapping spheres, between the study of Islam and Islamic culture in al-Andalus and the Maghreb, and the study of Muslims in interaction with religious others, most especially during the period coinciding with the Almoravid, Almohad, and Nasrid dynasties.

Much of my research has focused on the neglected topic of medieval Islamic preaching. I have just completed a book which explores the literary, rhetorical, ritual, juridical, and political aspects of pulpit oratory (khataba) and hortatory preaching (wa‘z) in medieval al-Andalus and the Maghreb. It discusses the role of medieval Islamic pulpit oratory in the cultural, political, and social life of medieval Muslims and seeks to alert scholars to the usefulness of Islamic sermons as a source for the study of the cultural and social history of pre-modern Muslim societies.

My current book project is a critical edition, translation, and study of a unique manuscript of a 13th-century sermonary of an anonymous Mudejar preacher from Aragon. The sermons shed light on how Aragonese Muslims reshaped their religious identity in light of the situation of Mudejarism and the criticisms stemming from their Muslim neighbors. I am also coordinating a monograph on medieval Christian, Jewish, and Muslim preaching and society, which will published in the Anuario de Estudios Medievales in 2012.

I have recently sought funding to launch a major research project on medieval Islamic oratory, which will include comparative studies on medieval Jewish and Christian sermons. I am looking for research collaborators who work on medieval Muslim or Jewish preaching in the Mediterranean.

My research has also engaged in topics traditionally under-represented in the scholarship on Islam but which have been important in Cultural Studies. For instance, I have been analyzing the body and society, the history of the emotions, and the construction of masculine identities using Muslim sermons, Andalusi adab texts from the Nasrid period, and medieval Andalusi, Maghrebi, Castilian, and Aragonese chronicles. I am elaborating a project on comparative medieval masculinities which seeks to provide a corrective to the scholarship dealing mainly with Christian literary representations of the Muslim and Jewish male “other” as either or feminized or hyper-sexed, to complement the research on medieval Islam which still largely equates gender studies with the study of women, and to explore gender as a means of studying religious boundaries. I am interested in collaborating with other scholars working on medieval Islamic and Jewish masculinities and gender.

Other current and future research projects: medieval conversion to Islam; Almohad and Nasrid religious cultures and ideologies; medieval Muslim-Jewish relations; and Andalusi and Maghrebi adab, chronicle, and biographical reflections about the changing relations of power between Muslims, Christians, and Jews in the Iberian Peninsula and the Maghreb in light of the Christian conquests of al-Andalus.