Conor Dube

Review | Berkovitz, A Life of Psalms in Jewish Late Antiquity — ANCIENT JEW REVIEW He moves the question of reception away from strictly exegetical approaches that look for a history of interpretation within a world of ideas, and towards how Jews in Late Antiquity encountered physic...

Review | Berkovitz, A Life of Psalms in Jewish Late Antiquity www.ancientjewreview.com/read/2026/2/...

The volume I’m co-editing with Prof. Joseph Verheyden — Writing Collective Biographies from Ancient Greece to the Early Islamic World — has also passed final reviews at Cambridge University Press. Many thanks to the participants for their fantastic contributions to the volume!

So my translations of al-Dani's Taysir is out! So what is this text about?

It is a description of seven canonical reading traditions of the Quran authored by the Andalusi polymath ʾAbū ʿAmr ʿUṯmān b. Saʿīd al-Dānī (371/981–444/1053).

Not sure if this is your question but it looks like a representation of the meter - usually given with variants of فعل. I don’t know the Turkish meters but it looks very close to the Arabic رمل, except for the last foot: ْفاعلاتُنْ فاعلاتُنْ فاعلاتُن.

146. Ezana of Aksum, the first Christian king in Africa, with Aaron Butts

Great episode of Byzantium & Friends w/Aaron Butts!

While centering on Aksum, it engages key questions in the study of late antique empires, such as how to historicize the use of religious imagery in imperial self-presentation, & the proxy war model (e.g. Bowersock)
open.spotify.com/episode/4gkP...

“Even God Cannot Hear Us Here”: What I Witnessed Inside an ICE Women’s Prison Tufts University doctoral student Rümeysa Öztürk opens up about her 45 days in a South Louisiana processing facility—and the generous and compassionate women she met.

Rümeysa is one of the kindest, most compassionate people I have ever met. Many of you came to know her first and foremost as an ICE abductee, seized by a state that wanted to strip her of her humanity. I would like for you to know her in her own words, which are resoundingly human.

Just spent 10 minutes trying to find this thread of recommended books, so now that I have, here's a boost:

One for the ages. The only anthology of High Tang poetry that was actually compiled during the High Tang, now translated into English by Paul Kroll.

Bujangga Manik: Or, Java in the Fifteenth Century My book on Bujangga Manik has been published by Brill under the title Bujangga Manik: Or, Java in the Fifteenth Century.

Hard copies of my book arrived a few days ago, and I've finally found the time to write a bit about it and why you should read it (or get your library to buy it).
indomedieval.medium.com/bujangga-man...

Historians as a profession are facing the same crunch as journalists and other professions in the digital age where there is plenty of demand but an economic model that remunerates the people who do the final repackaging for the public while funding for the production of original work dries up.

Starting the week by facilitating engagements with the very latest scholarship in Middle East Studies. If you're the #author of a new book on the Middle East, or oversee a list regarding the region as an #editor, don't hesitate to reach out. I'd love to learn more about recent and exciting work!

Gable section from a bed tent embroidered with many different birds and flower motifs.

Embroidery with checkerboard bands of black and white squares and miniature crenellations divides this panel into eight sections, each with an eight-pointed star within a 'wheel of life' medallion.

Embroidered cushion cover showing a man riding a horse, surrounded by decorative motifs of flowers.

🧵We're excited to announce a new section of the Cambridge Digital Library for the Fitzwilliam Museum’s collection of Mediterranean embroideries.

View the full collection: https://loom.ly/BPvABM4

Return to Syria: what I found amid the ruins of Homs Living in exile, Ammar Azzouz studied urban destruction in war. Then he returned to the ruins of his own city

Really powerful piece in the FT magazine this weekend from @britishacademy.bsky.social Postdoctoral Fellow Ammar Azzouz - a researcher of urban destruction who returns to the ruins of his own city in Syria.
on.ft.com/3TozwJO

Islamic Televangelism: A Preliminary Sketch Matthew J. Kuiper PhD, Hope College, Michigan, USA While they are not alone among the world’s religions in fostering and encouraging preaching, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam are unquestionably “pre...

My latest just dropped: A discussion of modern Islamic televangelism (yes it’s a thing) situated in longer Islamic history. It's a *preliminary* sketch & preview of a forthcoming chapter. Thanks to the good folks at Predicmo & Aix-Marseille University. (AI was not used in any aspect of this piece) 🗃️

All I’m asking, as an American, is for another set of Americans on a hill to have the moral courage and tenacity to fight for the Republic

At the end of the day, this is the experiment of democracy

I’ve long loved this quote. What a catastrophe

📢 New publication! July's 𝘋𝘰𝘤𝘶𝘮𝘦𝘯𝘵 𝘰𝘧 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘔𝘰𝘯𝘵𝘩 is now available at bit.ly/InvisibleEastQurans

🔍 Alya Karame looks at Qur'anic fragments from the Islamicate East that represent a turning point in the history of the Qur'an.

#documents #quran #firuzkuh #bamiyan

A problem with this decision that goes way beyond the law is that we live in a country where decidedly NON-religious viewpoints are increasingly bolted onto religion. When your church is saying climate change is a lie and vaccines are evil it's untenable to teach anything under this model

I want to reiterate that countless conservative judges issued universal injunctions against the Biden administration, and the Supreme Court never halted the practice. Now, barely five months into Trump's second term, the court puts an end to these injunctions. A brazen double standard.

all of my immersive language study came out of federal funding.
Cuts to humanities funding will have long-term consequences across a lot of fields. It is tragic. Already only 40% of citizens hold a passport. w/out scholars who study world lang, politics, history, culture there’s only navel gazing

Managing Libya's Cultural Heritage project celebrates milestones As the Managing Libya’s Cultural Heritage (MaLiCH) project, funded by ALIPH (the International Alliance for the Protection of Heritage), enters its final phase, the project team has concluded a major…

Update from the Managing Libya's Cultural Heritage project! This project is now in its final phase after a major round of fieldwork across Libya, which you can read about here:

“The Bildungsroman Emperor”

This historiographical review is brilliant. In my teaching the vast, diverse, and prone-to-endless-misunderstandings-and-misuses territory called ‘The Crusades’, I’ve used Tyerman’s pointed but accessible Crusades: A Very Short Introduction. Students… 1/

The Morisco Diaspora and the Morisco Networks across the Western and Eastern Mediterranean "The Morisco Diaspora and the Morisco Networks across the Western and Eastern Mediterranean" published on 29 May 2025 by Brill.

🚨 The Morisco diaspora and the Morisco networks across the Western and Eastern Mediterranean by @gerardwiegers.bsky.social and Mercedes García-Arenal is now available OPEN ACCESS !

brill.com/display/titl...

📕📘📙 ATLAS-cities NEW BOOK:
¿CIUDADES INVISBLES? Paisajes urbanos de la Antigüedad tardía (siglos III-VIII)
📍 Sabine Panzram - Laurent Brassous 📌 CCV 201; 2025 ‼️
A co-production of 30 authors: France, Germany, Italy, Spain, The Netherlands, Tunisia, USA etc.
books.openedition.org/.../libro/ci...

Researching the Post-Imperial City in a Post‑Transformation World, 2000–2023 Introduction: Epochs and Regions Writing an essay that reflects the state of the field is a tightrope act. The sheer number of publications, research projects, and excavation reports that are being published every year makes it difficult to keep up with individual developments. However, there is little doubt that taking stock is a productive and useful endeavour, as every field requires a certain degree of self-reflection. On a more specific level, Late Antique and Early Medieval urbanism has been fortunate when it comes to such overviews of research. From studies giving summaries of the direction of inquiry to broader monographs that reflect on the whole epoch, recent years have seen a significant drive to reevaluate the state of the field. The purpose of this essay is not to replace these studies. Instead, building on them it will offer a continuation. I can only echo the sentiment of my predecessors and say that this will be a subjective and idiosyncratic perspective and not one that claims comprehensiveness. Here I will focus mainly on works from the last two decades. This essay should then not be seen as an exhaustive survey of the research on urban spaces of the latter two thirds of the first millennium. Instead, in the tradition of the history of historiography, it is a reflection on the state of the art as a valuable research goal in and of itself, an attempt to understand how we got where we are in the first place. The examples from scholarly literature given here will be, by necessity, selective and illustrative.

The city is often a mirror of our scholarly approaches. Therefore, very excited to see this out—my overview of the recent views of late antique and early medieval urban worlds and a sketch of new methodologies for the city in the first millennium. In open access: books.openedition.org/cvz/54316