Maybe it's time for a thread on medieval Romani history?
The last major monograph on the topic was De Goeje's 1903 "Mémoire sur les migrations des tsiganes à travers l'Asie." Since then, medieval Asian Roma have been largely lost as historical subjects. https://t.co/ZsrZvAIptH
Join us February 4th at 1 PM EST for our first book conversation of the semester - Professor @krisrich will discuss her book "Roma in the Medieval Islamic World" with Marina Rustow https://t.co/2zkhSLOtxB
#BIEAaEvents
✨ Join us @The_BIEA on May 22, 2026, at 2pm-EAT for an insightful hybrid lecture titled 'The Global Geopolitics of Holy Spaces from Ottoman Jerusalem to the Red Sea Basin' by Professor Mostafa Minawi. Don't miss it!
✅ Registration: https://t.co/712Y5mEHjr
@CornellCAS@BSAthens@theBIAAnkara@BIPS-Britac @LibyanStudies #OttomanHistory #Geopolitics #Events
The engine of social mobility and democracy is cheap, high quality public education: CUNY, the great land grant universities, the state schools, community colleges, HBCUs. In the scheme of things, a few token poors at U of Chicago or Harvard means nothing.
Let this sink in:
A person with the *median* income in Mozambique is at the 3rd lowest global percentile; a person with the median income in Congo is at the 2nd lowest global percentile.
A person with the median German income is at the 91st global percentile. A person with the median US income is at the 93rd global percentile.
(latest data)
Workshop on 16c & 17c printing in African, Hebraic, and Middle Eastern languages
4-5 May 2026 at the @librarycongress
Register in person at https://t.co/vlySnXV9nl
Via zoom at https://t.co/z3jTLgpmvV
Via @krisrich
In the podcast: Craig Perry's "Slavery and the Jews of Medieval Egypt" dives into everyday documents, like wills and manumission deeds, to reconstruct how Jewish households in Egypt bought, sold, owned and freed enslaved people... https://t.co/ueY3AhbUpy
I just came out of a fascinating virtual presentation on this book, which argues that enslaved labor is central to the production and transmission of the New Testament. In other words, you could think of Christianity as religion powered by the enslaved.
They served as soldiers and laborers, gradually converted to Islam, and eventually migrated through Armenia and Anatolia into Europe. References to the Zutt in medieval Arabic sources effectively describe proto-Romani and Dom populations before their westward dispersal.
Per de Goeje and confirmed by modern genetics and linguistics, the Roma descend from the Jat (Zutt) of northwestern India/Sind, who were relocated to Iran and Iraq under Sasanian and early Islamic rule.
Earlier this month, @VUBrussel annulled the planned appointment of @HarrygPettit after a short but fierce cancel-campaign, here on @X and elsewhere.
If you value academic freedom and freedom of expression, please read and consider signing this open letter: https://t.co/e9dQJAhSRF
ICE arrested our beloved professor Vahid Abedini.
He is Farzaneh Family Assistant Prof of Iranian Studies at the University of Oklahoma's @OklahomaU's Boren College of International Studies @oucis
Dr. Abedini was boarding a flight on his way to attend the Middle East Studies Association (@MESA_1966) in Washington DC when he was detained and put to jail. Nov 22.
He has been wrongfully detained because he has a valid H-1B visa —a non-immigrant work visa granted to individuals in “specialty occupations,” including higher education faculty.
We are praying for his swift release.
#OpenAccess#NewRelease
An Important Volume
#IslamicManuscript#Codicology#Marginalia
Marginal Matters Explorations into Commenting and Glossing Techniques in Arabic Manuscript Cultures
ed. Stefanie Brinkmann.BRill 2025
https://t.co/6KDmI7dX4i
PDF🎯
https://t.co/m9SPmMhfJN
Der Islam 102.2 is hot off the press! First up:
[open-access] Ana Davitashvili, "Sealing and the Root kh-t-m in the Qurʾān and pre-Islamic Christian Literature: On the 'Seal of the Prophets' and Disbelievers Having 'Seals on Their Hearts and Hearing'”
https://t.co/heb4m0a8TF
the best way to encourage students to resist the temptation of ChatGPT is to help them feel like real writers & take pride in their voice. I tell my students to start writing “morning pages”—three handwritten pages on anything they want to write about. I tell them to transcribe themselves talking on the phone about their paper ideas to someone. I tell them to read their work out loud & hear how they sound—& if they like how they sound. I tell them to pick unique sign offs for emails (down with “Best”). I tell them to read their social media posts & text messages & to analyze them for voice—their tone, their use of internal punctuation, their humor. I encourage them instead of police them. I make a case for writing as an art they should try to master.
as an English professor, I’d go as far to say these days I’m excited to see typos & fragments & run on sentences & page-long paragraphs & awkward word choices & any imperfection that suggests a human being sat down to do the very hard thing of writing a college paper.