Paul M. Cobb

Paul M. Cobb is Edmund J. and Louise W. Kahn Term Professor of Middle Eastern Languages and Cultures. He is a social and cultural historian of the pre-modern Islamic world. He has been teaching at Penn since 2008. His areas of interest include animal studies, Arabic historiography, Islamic relations with the West, and the history of travel and exploration. He is, in particular, a recognized authority on the history of the medieval Crusades in their Islamic context. He is the author of White Banners: Contention in ‘Abbasid Syria, 750-880 (SUNY Press, 2001); Usama ibn Munqidh: Warrior-Poet of the Age of Crusades (Oneworld, 2005); The Book of Contemplation: Islam and the Crusades, a translation of the “memoirs” and other works of Usama ibn Munqidh (Penguin Classics, 2008), and The Race for Paradise: An Islamic History of the Crusades (Oxford University Press, 2014), which has been translated into multiple languages. He is the editor of The Lineaments of Islam: Studies in Honor of Fred McGraw Donner (E. J. Brill, 2012); the co-editor (with Wout van Bekkum) of Strategies of Medieval Communal Identity: Judaism, Christianity, and Islam (Peeters, 2003) and (with Antoine Borrut) of Umayyad Legacies: History and Memory from Syria to Spain (E. J. Brill, 2010); and the author of numerous articles.

He is currently at work on an edition and translation of a 14th-century Arabic manual of hunting advice and animal lore by the Mamluk courtier Ibn Manglī for the Library of Arabic Literature; an analysis of Fatimid accounts of Crusader activities preserved in the Cairo Geniza; and an assessment of the historical work of the Lebanese Orientalist Philip K. Hitti (d. 1978).

Prof. Cobb welcomes graduate applicants interested in any period of medieval Islamic history, from late Antiquity to 1500, and especially in the areas of history and historiography, animal studies, and travel and geography.