Abigail Krasner Balbale-Bio

Abigail Krasner Balbale is Assistant Professor at Bard Graduate Center in New York City, where she teaches Islamic history, art and material culture. She received her PhD in History and Middle Eastern Studies from Harvard in 2012, and previously taught at the University of Massachusetts Boston. She has served as secretary of the Historians of Islamic Art Association and was also a founding board member of the Spain North Africa Project. Her research has been supported by Fulbright, NEH, ACLS and Mellon Fellowships. Her recent publications include two co-edited volumes, Justice and Leadership in Early Islamic Courts (Harvard, 2017), Spanning the Strait: Studies in Unity in the Western Mediterranean (Brill, 2013), an article on jihad as a legitimating tactic in thirteenth-century al-Andalus, and an essay on the Berber dynasties of the Islamic far west in the new Blackwell Companion to Islamic Art. With Jerrilynn Dodds and María Rosa Menocal she co-authored the prize-winning book The Arts of Intimacy: Christians, Jews and Muslims in the Making of Castilian Culture (Yale, 2008). She is currently working on a book tentatively entitled “Wolf King of Glorious Memory: Affiliation, Accommodation and Resistance in al-Andalus.”