Research
How communities negotiate religious change
My research examines the social worlds of Jews, Christians, and Muslims in early and medieval Islamic societies—especially the ways law, kinship, conversion, and cultural mediation shaped communal life.
Approach
History through social relationships
Rather than treating religious communities as sealed and self-contained, I study the relationships that crossed their boundaries: marriage and family, recourse to courts, conversion and apostasy, intellectual exchange, and the movement of people and ideas.
Legal, narrative, and documentary sources reveal how religious identities were negotiated in daily life. They also show how minorities and majorities shaped one another within the evolving institutions of Islamic civilization.
Core themes
A connected research agenda
Conversion and religious change
How conversion reshaped identity, family ties, communal membership, and relations of authority.
Kinship and community
How families endured, adapted, or fractured when relatives belonged to different religious communities.
Law and overlapping jurisdictions
Why Jews and Christians sometimes turned to Muslim courts, and how religious elites responded.
Cultural brokerage
How people operating across cultural boundaries translated knowledge and helped shape Islamic civilization.
Research areas
Explore the work in greater depth
Haifa · 2018–2020
Kinship and Community in Early Islam
Kinship as a field of encounter: how family, marriage, inheritance, and communal allegiance interacted across religious boundaries.
Jerusalem · 2020–2021
Cultural Brokerage in Pre-Modern Islam
How brokers moved knowledge, practices, institutions, and authority across cultural boundaries and helped shape Islamic societies.
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