Position:

British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow

Faculty / College Address:

Oriental Institute / Wolfson College

Email:

thomas.munt@orinst.ox.ac.uk

Research Interests:

• Islamic history.
• History of pre- and early Islamic Arabia, especially the Ḥijāz.
• Arabic and Persian historiography.

Current Projects:

• Local history-writing and regionalism in the medieval Islamic world.
• Medina’s status as a holy city in the early Islamic period.

Recent Publications:

• ‘Ibn al-Azraq, St. Marūthā, and the Foundation of Mayyāfāriqīn (Martyropolis)’. In Writing ‘True Stories’: Historians and Hagiographers in the Late Antique and Medieval Near East. Edited by Arietta Papaconstantinou, in collaboration with Muriel Debié and Hugh Kennedy. Cultural Encounters in Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages 9. Turnhout: Brepols, 2010. Pp. 149-74.

Forthcoming:

• ‘Writing the History of an Arabian Holy City: Ibn Zabāla and the First Local History of Medina’.  Forthcoming in Arabica (2012).
• ‘The Prophet’s City before the Prophet: Ibn Zabāla (d. after 199/814) on Pre-Islamic Medina’.  Forthcoming in History and Identity in the Eastern Mediterranean, 500-100. Edited by Philip Wood. Oxford University Press.